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Chimps Belong in Human Genus?
Bradley Chapman writes "I found this interesting story from Discovery News about our ties with chimpanzees. Excerpts: 'Chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of functionally important DNA with humans and belong in our genus, Homo, according to a recent genetic study.
Scientists analyzed 97 human genes, along with comparable sequences from chimps, gorillas, orangutans and Old World monkeys (a group that includes baboons and macaques). The researchers then took the DNA data and estimated genetic evolution over time. They determined that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor between 4 and 7 million years ago. That ancestor diverged from gorillas 6 to 7 million years ago.'" Genus is the next step up from species, if you recall your taxonomy. Humans are the only living species in genus homo, currently.
Chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of functionally important DNA with humans and belong in our genus, Homo, according to a recent genetic study. Scientists analyzed 97 human genes, along with comparable sequences from chimps, gorillas, orangutans and Old World monkeys (a group that includes baboons and macaques).
We've only fully mapped the human genome so far. I bet if we fully mapped the chimp genome, we'd see many many more entries in the diff log than we thought.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
But that on the condition that i can downgrade some humans to monkey.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Goodman added, "In terms of culture, social behavior, language and other factors, we share many things in common with chimpanzees."
There was a guy at a nursing home I worked at that would throw poop at the staff.
Well, it may not be completely stinky, but it is close.
Our current system for categorizing the inhabitants of this is long outdated and is based largely on phsycal characteristics of the components on the creature, rather than the stuff it is actually made up of.
We find we've had to tweak this existing system to make new species fit. We've even had to add new kindoms! Many species bridge, these categories making them all the more harder to classify.
A better, more accurate, system needs to be devised based on current technologies that classify based on genetic code. The point of a classification system would be to allow us to draw similarities in creatures while studying them based on available data for ones in the same category. A genetic model would be very beneficial for this very reason.
IMHO.
For what it is worth, the raw similarity in the genome sequence doesn't need to indicate the same degree of similarity. Transcription is quite complex (much of it we still don't understand) and it is possible that small differences in regulatory regions can cause completely different parts of the sequence to be expressed.
Humans are the only living species in genus homo, currently.
If we are the only species, that would make us "homo genus".
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Why not put them in the same Genus as us? They've had just as much time to evolve.
Clearly, we made better use of that time than they did. They slacked off instead of evolving, so they don't get to be in the same rank.
I don't get this desire to uplift losers with false titles designed to boost the self esteem of those who fell behind.
Of course now with Hollywood and TV causing humans to devolve, the Chimps will have a chance to catch up.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Wolves are not genetically identical to dogs, any more than beagles are genetically identical to rotweilers: the consistent phenotypic differences between dog breeds, and between dogs and wolves, are genetically determined.
If being genetically identical were the key, each human (or pair of twins) would be a species unto himself.
But what people mean by species is usually more determined by whether the animals interbreed and produce fertile offspring (this gets fuzzy with plants and is more or less irrelevant to bacteria, but still...).
Dogs and wolves are close enough to interbreed, successfully and often, and a lot of people would class dogs as a subspecies of wolf (Canis lupus latrans).
But classification by genus and higher levels is fairly arbitrary, based mostly on what people see as significant differences and similarities (e.g. people are different from apes, cats all kind of look alike). The only important thing is that the basic nesting is right, so that if species A and B have a common ancestor, and C and D are descended from B, then if A and C are in one class, B and D are also in that class.
It might be more rational to have a system that took each branching into account, but we don't have enough information for that, and it would be inconvenient to deal with.
To sum up: the argument that no one calls a wolf a dog is incorrect, but there's still no point in calling a chimp a Homo.
So far
total human reads: 23 million
total chimp reads (Pan troglodytes): over 12 million
having worked on annotation of a few of the chimp BAC clones, I can assure you the two species range from about 97% to over 99.9% similar at the DNA sequence level.
And in other news, the Chimpanzee World Spokesman, uu uu waaa uuu u, says they want no part of any "tree" that has humans in it, thank you very much, and, besides, it's against THEIR religion to believe that humans evolved from Chimps. Especially the ones with fake hair.
Scientists then discovered that Apes have a 100% DNA match with Vin Diesel.
Vonal Declosion