Are there any other gaps in the evolutionary chain as large as the one between man and ape?
The “gap” between humans and apes is only as large as it is because the intermediate species are all extinct, which is not uncommon at all when looking at modern species in any family. Having said that, the gap isn’t actually all that large; the full sequencing of the chimp genome, completed in 2004 and fully compared to ours in 2005, demonstrates that although there are some large sequence duplications, deletions, or reversals, overall there is a ~96% base pair-per-base pair identity between the human genome and the chimp genome, and the majority of the differences actually lie in the noncoding (i.e. “junk”) 98% of the genomes. Most of our protein-coding genes differ by only a few base pairs (significant differences were found in 1,525 out of about 25,000 genes), and in roughly 6% of the protein-coding genes the base pair sequences are absolutely 100% identical — a degree of similarity not even approached by any other organism which has been sequenced, and in fact far more indication
