[Leonis]

Originally posted by Moiraine: *snip* Nah, isn't it interesting that the closest to us living things look, the more genes they share with us ? We share 99.5 % of our genes with Chimpanzees, and 70 % with bananas. Were it the other way around, I would be the first to agree with you that it is (probably) meaningless. *snip*

But science is constantly changing it's position on this:

Source Insertions and Deletions in the Human Family Tree The DNA sequences of humans and chimpanzees may not be as closely related as once believed. Divergence in DNA sequence can act as a measuring stick for the evolutionary relatedness of species. For decades, scientists estimated that 98.5% of human and chimpanzee DNA is the same, based upon the temperatures at which similar DNA strands from the two species break apart from each other. Roy Britten from the California Institute of Technology revisited the question of sequence divergence by directly analyzing about 735,000 DNA bases from both human and chimpanzee genome sequences. His results show that the number of single base substitutions, replacing one DNA base with another, was 1.4%, in agreement with previous estimates. However, the old estimates did not include insertion or deletion events (indels), where one or more DNA base is lost or inserted into a stretch of DNA. Although indels occur about 10 times less frequently than single base substitutions, indels typically involve many more bases. Adding indels to the single base changes yields a new estimate of 95% DNA sequence identity between humans and chimpanzees. Further genome sequencing, and the fact that indels can serve as useful molecular markers to distinguish between closely related species, should allow scientists to resolve disputes regarding which primate species is most closely related to humans.

I don't understand everthing in here (I chacked out the full article) but it says to me that there is still a long way to go before we know how close human and various animal DNA really is. We seem to be even further from understanding fully what that relationship then means.