Resumo de Chimpanzees Closer To Humans Than To Apes

Chimpanzees
closer to humans than to Apes. Genetic tests comparing DNA from humans, chimps,
gorillas, and orang-utans reveal striking similarities in the way chimps and
humans evolve.
Author:Ian Sample

Abstract: srjasferTIHEY ALREADY use basic tools have
rudimentary language and star in TV commercials, but now scientists have proof
that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than other great-apes.
Genetic tests comparing Uniform humans chimps gorillas and orangutans reveal
striking similarities in the way chimps and humans evolve that set them apart
from the others. The finding adds weight to a controversial proposal to scrap
the long-used chimp genus Pan and reclassify the animals as members of the
human family. The move would give chimps a new lilac in creation's pecking order
alongside humans, the only survivor of the genus Homo. Biologist Soojin Yi's
team at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta compared 63 million base pairs of DNA
from different species, where each base is a letter in the animal's genetic
code. They then analyzed the DNA to look at what evolutionary biologists call
the molecular clock the rate at which an animal?s genetic code evolves. The
speed of the clock shows how the span of a generation has changed over the
millennia. The tests showed that even though
humans and chimps split from a common ancestor between five million and
seven million years ago, the rate at which their genetic codes were evolving was extremely similar, differing by
only three per cent, and much slower than gorillas and orangutans. A slow
molecular clock suggests that the time between generations is long something
that has historically set humans apart from the great apes. Team member Navin
Elango said: l Me found that the chimpanzee's generation time is a lot closer
to that of humans than it is to other apes. According to the scientists, whose
study appears today in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences the finding suggests some human traits only emerged one million years
ago, a fleeting moment on evolutionary scales. This study provides further
support for the hypothesis that human and chimpanzees should be in one genus,
rather than in two different geniuses, because we not only share extremely
similar genomes, we share similar generation time, said Dr. Yi. Doubts over the
chimp's position in the evolutionary tree have been around from the start. In
177b when scientists first got around to naming the chimpanzee, they noted the
similarity with people and placed them next to humans under the genus Homo. But
by lg16, chimps had been pushed out into their own genus, Pan, which has
survived to this day. In 1991, Pulitzer prize-winning ecologist Jared Diamond
called humans. The third chimpanzee setting us alongside the common chimp (Pan Troglodytes)
and its less aggressive but astoundingly promiscuous cousin, the bonobo (pan
paniscus). By L999, confusion over the biological status of chimpanzees
prompted scientists in New
Zealand to join forces with lawyers to
petition the country?s government to pass a bill conferring rights on
chimpanzees and other primates. The move drew derision. New Zealand
granted great apes legal protection from animal experimentation. British Home Office
guidelines also forbid experiments on chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. In 2OO6
researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit again ignite ten debate when
they found that 99.4 per cent of the most critical DNA sites are identical in
human and chimp genes prompting the lead researcher, Morris Goodman, to declare
that chimps and humans should be brought together under the same umbrella
genus, Homo. There have been discussions about whether chimpanzees should be
afforded more protection and this might make things a bit clearer in peoples'
minds about whether they should have rights of some kind. In terms of life on
Earth, chimps and humans are really not thafferent to each other said
Andrew Rambaut an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University.
Practically, he adds reclassification
could raise the chimp's profile and potentially improve their conservation.
"It seems a bit human-centric to want to put chimps into the Homo?genus
and not reclassify humans as 'Pan.' But these things are arbitrary once you've
divided it into species. It would become a more political decision than anything
else

Resumos Relacionados