Of a quarter million terminal, the reverse of his wish: relative,
Not absolute, numbers stand as umpire and narrative.
Insofar as graduations are claimed for primate phylogenies
Certainty lies only in attempted disproof of hypotheses.¹
Bertie: You’ll pop them one on the jaw with that one, Jeeves!...
Jeeves: Dr Alexander (“Chimp”) Twist is as slippery as smears
Of axle-grease could make him, as you know. Now he schemes
To grab over 98 per cent of human genes:
He closes his hand, like the clasp of chimp DNA
Around human, 2 per cent mismatched (2 degrees away
From the annealing temperature of a mirror image) and steals
A fistful of identical, aligned characters. So he feels
It vindicates the homology thesis, invoking his ancestor!
DNA is a twisted zip, a chromosomal jester
That grins multimillion teeth, christened ’base pairs’.
But the pride of ancestry Chimp stole can give him no airs,
For much gene profile is padding, while the 2 per cent
Of human genome, that bust his zip, had bent
Two million of his teeth, so loud with signals of distinction!
Some say that our distinction is due to homologous regions
Losing identity with the time-lapse since Speciation Day
When we said goodbye to Gramp Twist. But law’s the mainstay
Of realist science! The discovery that congruities exist
Between genomes should not have invoked the story of Twist
But hinted at constraints on possible genomes imposed
By general principles of organization! It’s also been proposed
That to explain the facts of homology by history and history
By homology is circular reasoning, assuming an ancestry
In order to prove it. Now the proper approach to the correspondences