Washington ? Chimpanzees are more closely related to people than to gorillas or other primates and probably should be included in the human branch of the family tree, a research team says.

The idea, sure to spark renewed debate about evolution and the relationship between humans and animals, comes from a team led by Morris Goodman at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

Currently, humans are alone in the genus Homo. But Goodman argues, “We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes.” He says humans and chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA, the molecule that codes for life.

The battle over how humans are related to chimps, gorillas and other monkeys has raged since 1859, when Charles Darwin described evolution in “On the Origin of Species.”

The dispute between religious and scientific factions got its greatest publicity in 1925 when Tennessee school teacher John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution.

And it continues to this day: Kansas reinstated the teaching of evolution in 2001, 18 months after the state school board voted to drop it from classes. Alabama and Georgia school boards voted to put stickers on biology books warning that evolution is controversial.

A genus is a group of closely related species. The human species, Homo sapiens, stands alone in the genus Homo. But there have been other species on the branch, such as Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal man.

Chimpanzees are in the genus Pan along with bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees.

Goodman’s proposal would establish three species under Homo. One would be Homo (Homo) sapiens, or humans; the second would be Homo (Pan) troglodytes, or common chimpanzees, and the third would be Homo (Pan) paniscus, or bonobo chimpanzees.

There is no official board in charge of placing animals in their various genera, and in some cases alternative classifications are available.

Goodman’s paper cites a proposal by George Gaylord Simpson that chimps and gorillas be combined in one genus — gorillas are in the genus Gorilla. Goodman proposes that, because chimps are more closely related to humans than to gorillas, they be added instead to Homo.

But Richard J. Sherwood, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, says Simpson made that proposal in 1963 and no one now argues to put chimps and gorillas in the same genus.

“To go hunting for an historical reference like that and then use it as the sole criteria for suggesting a major shift in primate systematics is difficult to take seriously,” Sherwood said.