| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Bob Loblaw" |
| Date: |
03 Oct 2006 11:33:33 PM |
| Object: |
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and chimpanzees.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283,00.html
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| User: "A" |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
04 Oct 2006 06:27:20 AM |
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Bob Loblaw wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and chimpanzees.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283,00.html
Which probably explains how Bush was re-elected.
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| User: "Sara Brum" |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
04 Oct 2006 11:14:32 AM |
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"A" <a@man.com> wrote in message
news:T4KdnY-CDvTVyb7YnZ2dnUVZ_uqdnZ2d@adelphia.com...
Bob Loblaw wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and
chimpanzees.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283,00.html
Which probably explains how Bush was re-elected.
It also explains Bush.
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| User: "Bob Loblaw" |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
04 Oct 2006 05:30:12 PM |
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Sara Brum wrote:
"A" <a@man.com> wrote in message
news:T4KdnY-CDvTVyb7YnZ2dnUVZ_uqdnZ2d@adelphia.com...
Bob Loblaw wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and
chimpanzees.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283,00.html
Which probably explains how Bush was re-elected.
It also explains Bush.
Yeah - so does this....
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/
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| User: "IKnowHimDoYou- A." |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
04 Oct 2006 04:14:54 PM |
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In article <1159932868_7831@sp6iad.superfeed.net>, wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and chimpanzees.
__________________________________________________________________
Yep, and about the same between a normal person and an idiot...
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| User: "Pangur Ban" |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
04 Oct 2006 06:56:06 PM |
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(IKnowHimDoYou- A.) wrote in
news:IKnowHim-0410060914540001@pm8-02.kalama.com:
In article <1159932868_7831@sp6iad.superfeed.net>,
wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and
chimpanzees.
__________________________________________________________________
Yep, and about the same between a normal person and an idiot...
I am so glad I have that positive 1.23% difference from you.
Pangur - nonchristian theist
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| User: "IKnowHimDoYou- A." |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
05 Oct 2006 03:42:12 PM |
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In article <Xns9852839536458PangurBan.worldnetat@63.218.45.20>, Pangur Ban
<Pangur-Ban$@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
IKnowHim@leavingsoon.com (IKnowHimDoYou- A.) wrote in
news:IKnowHim-0410060914540001@pm8-02.kalama.com:
In article <1159932868_7831@sp6iad.superfeed.net>,
wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and
chimpanzees.
__________________________________________________________________
Yep, and about the same between a normal person and an idiot...
I am so glad I have that positive 1.23% difference from you.
Pangur - nonchristian theist
_________________________________________________________
Yeh, and that is all you got!
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| User: "Pangur Ban" |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
05 Oct 2006 03:55:14 PM |
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(IKnowHimDoYou- A.) wrote in
news:IKnowHim-0510060842120001@pm6-10.kalama.com:
In article <Xns9852839536458PangurBan.worldnetat@63.218.45.20>, Pangur
Ban <Pangur-Ban$@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
(IKnowHimDoYou- A.) wrote in
news:IKnowHim-0410060914540001@pm8-02.kalama.com:
In article <1159932868_7831@sp6iad.superfeed.net>,
urhere@spammail.com wrote:
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and
chimpanzees.
__________________________________________________________________
Yep, and about the same between a normal person and an idiot...
I am so glad I have that positive 1.23% difference from you.
Pangur - nonchristian theist
_________________________________________________________
Yeh, and that is all you got!
To be 1.23% more human than you is enough.
Pangur - nonchristian theist
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! |
08 Oct 2006 06:40:22 PM |
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On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 23:33:33 +0000, Bob Loblaw <urhere@spammail.com>
wrote in alt.atheism
There is roughly 1.23% difference in the genome of humans and chimpanzees.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283,00.html
Sunday, Oct. 1, 2006
What Makes us Different?
Not very much, when you look at our DNA. But those few tiny changes made
all the difference in the world
By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, ANDREA DORFMAN
You don't have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely
the great apes--gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans--resemble
us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as
ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes
have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other
creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily
expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That's
why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or
riding bicycles. It's why a potbellied gorilla scratching itself in the
zoo reminds us of Uncle Ralph or Cousin Vinnie--and why, in a more
unsettled reaction, Queen Victoria, on seeing an orangutan named Jenny
at the London Zoo in 1842, declared the beast "frightful and painfully
and disagreeably human."
It isn't just a superficial resemblance. Chimps, especially, not only
look like us, they also share with us some human-like behaviors. They
make and use tools and teach those skills to their offspring. They prey
on other animals and occasionally murder each other. They have complex
social hierarchies and some aspects of what anthropologists consider
culture. They can't form words, but they can learn to communicate via
sign language and symbols and to perform complex cognitive tasks.
Scientists figured out decades ago that chimps are our nearest
evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the
genetic level. When it comes to DNA, a human is closer to a chimp than a
mouse is to a rat.
Yet tiny differences, sprinkled throughout the genome, have made all the
difference. Agriculture, language, art, music, technology and
philosophy--all the achievements that make us profoundly different from
chimpanzees and make a chimp in a business suit seem so deeply
ridiculous--are somehow encoded within minute fractions of our genetic
code. Nobody yet knows precisely where they are or how they work, but
somewhere in the nuclei of our cells are handfuls of amino acids,
arranged in a specific order, that endow us with the brainpower to
outthink and outdo our closest relatives on the tree of life. They give
us the ability to speak and write and read, to compose symphonies, paint
masterpieces and delve into the molecular biology that makes us what we
are.
Until recently, there was no way to unravel these crucial differences.
Exactly what gives us advantages like complex brains and the ability to
walk upright--and certain disadvantages, including susceptibility to a
particular type of malaria, AIDS and Alzheimer's, that don't seem to
afflict chimps--remained a mystery.
But that's rapidly changing. Just a year ago, geneticists announced that
they had sequenced a rough draft of the chimpanzee genome, allowing the
first side-by-side comparisons of human and chimpanzee DNA. Already,
that research has led to important discoveries about the development of
the human brain over the past few million years and possibly about our
ancestors' mating behavior as well.
And sometime in the next few weeks, a team led by molecular geneticist
Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
in Leipzig, Germany, will announce an even more stunning achievement:
the sequencing of a significant fraction of the genome of
Neanderthals--the human-like species we picture when we hear the word
caveman--who are far closer to us genetically than chimps are. And
though Neanderthals became extinct tens of thousands of years ago, Pääbo
is convinced he's on the way to reconstructing the entire genome of that
long-lost relative, using DNA extracted, against all odds, from a
38,000-year-old bone.
Laid side by side, these three sets of genetic blueprints--plus the
genomes of gorillas and other primates, which are already well on the
way to being completely sequenced--will not only begin to explain
precisely what makes us human but could lead to a better understanding
of human diseases and how to treat them.
FIRST GLIMMERINGS
Scientists didn't need to wait for the chimp genome to begin speculating
about the essential differences between humans and apes, of course. They
didn't even need to know about DNA. Much of the vitriol directed at
Charles Darwin a century and a half ago came not from his ideas about
evolution in general but from his insulting but logical implication that
humans and the African apes are descended from a common ancestor.
As paleontologists have accumulated more and more fossils, they have
compiled data on a long list of anatomical features, including body
shape, bipedalism, brain size, the shape of the skull and face, the size
of canine teeth, and opposable thumbs. Using comparative analyses of
these attributes, along with dating that shows when various features
appeared or vanished, they have constructed increasingly elaborate
family trees that show the relationships between apes, ancient hominids
and us. Along the way they learned, among other things, that Darwin,
even with next to no actual data, was close to being right in his
intuition that apes and humans are descended from a single common
ancestor--and, surprisingly, that the ability to walk upright emerged
millions of years before the evolution of our big brains.
But it wasn't until the 1960s that details of our physical relationship
to the apes started to be understood at the level of basic biochemistry.
Wayne State University scientist Morris Goodman showed, for example,
that injecting a chicken with a particular blood protein from a human, a
gorilla or a chimp provoked a specific immune response, whereas proteins
from orangutans and gibbons produced no response at all. And by 1975,
the then new science of molecular genetics had led to a landmark paper
by two University of California, Berkeley, scientists, Mary-Claire King
and Allan Wilson, estimating that chimps and humans share between 98%
and 99% of their genetic material.
ZEROING IN ON THE GENES
Even before the chimp genome was published, researchers had begun
teasing out our genetic differences. As long ago as 1998, for example,
glycobiologist Ajit Varki and colleagues at the University of
California, San Diego, reported that humans have an altered form of a
molecule called sialic acid on the surface of their cells. This variant
is coded for by a single gene, which is damaged in humans. Since sialic
acids act in part as a docking site for many pathogens, like malaria and
influenza, this may explain why people are more susceptible to these
diseases than, say, chimpanzees are.
A few years later, a team led by Pääbo announced that the human version
of a gene called FOXP2, which plays a role in our ability to develop
speech and language, evolved within the past 200,000 years--after
anatomically modern humans first appeared. By comparing the protein
coded by the human FOXP2 gene with the same protein in various great
apes and in mice, they discovered that the amino-acid sequence that
makes up the human variant differs from that of the chimp in just two
locations out of a total of 715--an extraordinarily small change that
may nevertheless explain the emergence of all aspects of human speech,
from a baby's first words to a Robin Williams monologue. And indeed,
humans with a defective FOXP2 gene have trouble articulating words and
understanding grammar.
Then, in 2004, a team led by Hansell Stedman of the University of
Pennsylvania identified a tiny mutation in a gene on chromosome 7 that
affects the production of myosin, the protein that enables muscle tissue
to contract. The mutant gene prevents the expression of a myosin
variant, known as MYH16, in the jaw muscles used in biting and chewing.
Since the same mutation occurs in all of the modern human populations
the researchers tested--but not in seven species of nonhuman primates,
including chimps--the researchers suggest that lack of MYH16 made it
possible for our ancestors to evolve smaller jaw muscles some 2 million
years ago. That loss in muscle strength, they say, allowed the braincase
and brain to grow larger. It's a controversial claim, one disputed by
anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University. "Brains don't
expand because they were permitted to do so," he says. "They expand
because they were selected"--because they conferred extra reproductive
success on their owners, perhaps by allowing them to hunt more
effectively than the competition.
BEYOND THE GENES
Still, the principle of gene-by-gene comparison remains a powerful one,
and just a year ago geneticists got hold of a long-awaited tool for
making those comparisons in bulk. Although the news was largely
overshadowed by the impact of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the same
week, the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the
journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things.
First, they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make
up both species' genomes differ by 1.23%--a ringing confirmation of the
1970s estimates--and that the most striking divergence between them
occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males. And
when they compared the two species' proteins--the large molecules that
cells construct according to blueprints embedded in the genes--they
found that 29% of the proteins were identical (most of the proteins that
aren't the same differ, on average, by only two amino-acid
substitutions).
The genetic differences between chimps and humans, therefore, must be
relatively subtle. And they can't all be due simply to a slightly
different mix of genes. Even before the human genome was sequenced back
in 2000, says biologist Sean Carroll of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, "it was estimated that humans had 100,000 genes. When we got
the genome, the estimate dropped to 25,000. Now we know the overall
number is about 22,000, and it might even come down to 19,000."
This shockingly small number made it clear to scientists that genes
alone don't dictate the differences between species; the changes, they
now know, also depend on molecular switches that tell genes when and
where to turn on and off. "Take the genes involved in creating the hand,
the penis and the vertebrae," says Lovejoy. "These share some of the
same structural genes. The pelvis is another example. Humans have a
radically different pelvis from that of apes. It's like having the
blueprints for two different brick houses. The bricks are the same, but
the results are very different."
Those molecular switches lie in the noncoding regions of the
genome--once known dismissively as junk DNA but lately rechristened the
dark matter of the genome. Much of the genome's dark matter is, in fact,
junk--the residue of evolutionary events long forgotten and no longer
relevant. But a subset of the dark matter known as functional noncoding
DNA, comprising some 3% to 4% of the genome and mostly embedded within
and around the genes, is crucial. "Coding regions are much easier for us
to study," says Carroll, whose new book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA
and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, delves deep into the
issue. "But it may be the dark matter that governs a lot of what we
actually see."
What causes changes in both the dark matter and the genes themselves as
one species evolves into another is random mutation, in which individual
base pairs--the "letters" of the genetic alphabet--are flipped around
like a typographical error. These changes stem from errors that occur
during sexual reproduction, as DNA is copied and recombined. Sometimes
long strings of letters are duplicated, creating multiple copies in the
offspring. Sometimes they're deleted altogether or even picked up,
turned around and reinserted backward. A group led by geneticist Stephen
Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has identified
1,576 apparent inversions between the chimp and human genomes; more than
half occurred sometime during human evolution.
When an inversion, deletion or duplication occurs in an unused portion
of the genome, nothing much changes--and indeed, the human, chimp and
other genomes are full of such inert stretches of DNA. When it happens
in a gene or in a functional noncoding stretch, by contrast, an
inversion or a duplication is often harmful. But sometimes, purely by
chance, the change gives the new organism some sort of advantage that
enables it to produce more offspring, thus perpetuating the change in
another generation.
WHAT THE APES CAN TEACH US
A striking example of how gene duplication may have helped propel us
away from our apelike origins appeared in Science last month. A research
team led by James Sikela of the University of Colorado at Denver and
Health Sciences Center, in Aurora, Colo., looked at a gene that is
believed to code for a piece of protein, called DUF1220, found in areas
of the brain associated with higher cognitive function. The gene comes
in multiple copies in a wide range of primates--but, the scientists
found, humans carry the most copies. African great apes have
substantially fewer copies, and the number found in more distant
kin--orangutans and Old World monkeys--drops off even more.
Another discovery, first published online by Nature two months ago,
describes a gene that appears to play a role in human brain development.
A team led by biostatistician Katherine Pollard, now at the University
of California, Davis, and Sofie Salama, of U.C. Santa Cruz, used a
sophisticated computer program to search the genomes of humans, chimps
and other vertebrates for segments that have undergone changes at
substantially accelerated rates. They eventually homed in on 49 discrete
areas they dubbed human accelerated regions, or HARS.
The region that changed most dramatically from chimps to humans, known
as HAR1, turns out to be part of a gene that is active in fetal brain
tissue only between the seventh and 19th weeks of gestation. Although
the gene's precise function is unknown, that happens to be the period
when a protein called reelin helps the human cerebral cortex develop its
characteristic six-layer structure. What makes the team's research
especially intriguing is that all but two of the HARs lie in those
enigmatic functional noncoding regions of the genome, supporting the
idea that much of the difference between species happens there.
SEX WITH CHIMPS?
Comparisons of primitive genomes have also led to an astonishing,
controversial and somewhat disquieting assertion about the origin of
humanity. Along with several colleagues, David Reich of the Broad
Institute in Cambridge, Mass., compared DNA from chimpanzees and humans
with genetic material from gorillas, orangutans and macaques. Scientists
have long used the average difference between genomes as a sort of
evolutionary clock because more closely related species have had less
time to evolve in different directions. Reich's team measured how the
evolutionary clock varied across chromosomes in the different species.
To their surprise, they deduced that chimps and humans split from a
common ancestor no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less
than 5.4 million years ago. If they're correct, several hominid species
now considered to be among our earliest ancestors--Sahelanthropus
tchadensis (7 million years old), Orrorin tugenensis (about 6 million
years old) and Ardipithecus kadabba (5.2 to 5.7 million years old)--may
have to be re-evaluated.
And that's not the most startling finding. Reich's team also found that
the entire human X chromosome diverged from the chimp's X chromosome
about 1.2 million years later than the other chromosomes. One plausible
explanation is that chimps and humans first split but later interbred
from time to time before finally going their separate evolutionary ways.
That could explain why some of the most ancient fossils now considered
human ancestors have such striking mixtures of chimp and human
traitssome could actually have been hybrids. Or they might have simply
coexisted with, or even predated, the last common ancestor of chimps and
humans.
All of that depends in part on the accuracy of fossil dating and the
reliability of using genetic variation as a clock. Both methods
currently carry big margins of error. But the more primate genomes that
geneticists can lay side by side, the more questions they will be able
to answer. "We have rough sequences for humans, orangutans, chimps,
macaques," says Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute and a
leader of the research team that decoded the chimpanzee genome. "But we
don't have the entire gorilla genome yet. Lemurs are coming along, and
so are gibbons."
DECODING NEANDERTHALS
Also coming along, thanks to two independent teams of researchers, is
the genome of the closest relative of all: the Neanderthal. Ancestors of
Neanderthals first appeared some 500,000 years ago, and for a long time
it was a toss-up whether that lineage would outlive our own species, at
least in Europe and western Asia--or whether, bizarre as it seems today,
they would both survive indefinitely. The Neanderthals held out for
hundreds of thousands of years. A discovery published online by Nature
last month suggests Neanderthals may have made their last stand in
Gibraltar, on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, surviving until
about 28,000 years ago--and possibly even longer.
The Neanderthals weren't nearly as primitive as many assume, observes
Eddy Rubin, director of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome
Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif. "They had fire, burial ceremonies, the
rudiments of what we would call art. They were advanced--but nothing
like what humans have done in the last 10,000 to 15,000 years." We
eventually outcompeted them, and the key to how we did so may well lie
in our genes. So two years ago, Svante Pääbo, the man who deconstructed
the FOXP2 language gene and has done considerable research on ancient
DNA, launched an effort to re-create the Neanderthal genome. Rubin,
meanwhile, is tackling the same task using a different technique.
The job isn't an easy one. Like any complex organic molecule, DNA
degrades over time, and bones that lie in the ground for thousands of
years become badly contaminated with the DNA of bacteria and fungi.
Anyone who handles the fossils can also leave human DNA behind. After
probing the remains of about 60 different Neanderthals out of the 400 or
so known, Pääbo and his team found only two with viable material.
Moreover, he estimates, only about 6% of the genetic material his team
extracts from the bones turns out to be Neanderthal DNA.
As a result, progress is maddeningly slow. And while he can't reveal
details, Pääbo says he'll soon be announcing in a major scientific
journal the sequencing of 1 million base pairs of the Neanderthal
genome. And he says he has 4 million more in the bag. Rubin, meanwhile,
is also poised to publish his results, but refuses to divulge specifics.
"Pääbo's team has significantly more of a sequence than we do," he says.
"Some of the dates will differ, but the conclusions are largely
similar."
Although Pääbo admits that he still hasn't learned much about what
distinguishes us from our closest cousins, simply showing he can
reconstruct significant DNA sequences from such long-dead creatures is
an important proof of concept. Both he and Rubin agree that within a
couple of years a reasonably complete Neanderthal genome should be
available. "It will tell us about aspects of biology, like soft tissue,
that we can't say anything about right now," Rubin notes. "It could tell
us about disease susceptibility and immunity. And in places where the
sequence overlaps that of humans, it will enable us to compare a
prehistoric creature with chimps." Someday it may even be possible to
insert equivalent segments of human and Neanderthal DNA into different
laboratory mice in order to see what effects they produce.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
Precisely how useful this information will be is hard to assess. Indeed,
a few experts are dismissive of the whole project. "I'm not sure what
Neanderthals will tell us," says Kent State's Lovejoy. "They're real
late [in terms of human evolution]. And they represent, at best, a
little environmental isolate in Europe. I can't imagine we're going to
learn much about human evolution by studying them." Lovejoy is even more
dismissive about claims that ancestors of chimps and humans interbred,
arguing that using mutation rates in the genome to time evolutionary
changes is extraordinarily imprecise.
In fact, even the most ardent proponents of genome-comparison research
acknowledge that pretty much everything we know so far is preliminary.
"We're interested in traits that really distance us from other
organisms," says Wisconsin's Carroll, "such as susceptibility to
diseases, big brains, speech, walking upright, opposable thumbs. Based
on the biology of other organisms, we have to believe that those are
very complex traits. The development of form, the increase in brain
size, took place over a long period of time, maybe 50,000 generations.
It's a pretty complicated genetic recipe."
But even the toughest critics acknowledge that these studies have
enormous potential. "We will eventually be able to pinpoint every
difference between every animal on the planet," says Lovejoy. "And every
time you throw another genome, like the gorilla's, into the mix, you
increase the chances even more."
Some of the differences could have enormous practical consequences.
Since his discovery that human cells lack one specific form of sialic
acid, which was accomplished even before the human genome was decoded,
Varki and his collaborators have determined that 10 of the 60 or so
genes that govern sialic-acid biology show major differences between
chimps and humans. "And in every case," says Varki, "it's humans who are
the odd one out." Such revelations could probably lead to a better
understanding of such devastating diseases as malaria, AIDS and viral
hepatitis and likely do so faster than by studying the human genome
alone.
For most of us, though, it's the grand question about what it is that
makes us human that renders comparative genome studies so compelling. As
scientists keep reminding us, evolution is a random process in which
haphazard genetic changes interact with random environmental conditions
to produce an organism somehow fitter than its fellows. After 3.5
billion years of such randomness, a creature emerged that could ponder
its own origins--and revel in a Mozart adagio. Within a few short years,
we may finally understand precisely when and how that happened.
With reporting by Alice Park
Copyright © 2006 Time Inc
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
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