Monday, May 19, 2003

On the other hand, so what? They're still "damned smelly monkeys."

This seems to be the "gosh-wow" science factoid of the hour. New Scientist reports that chimpanzees and humans have about 4.5% more genetic similarity than previously thought, which makes the genetic variance between Pongidae and Homo about .6 %. Here's the feed:

The new study found that 99.4 percent of the most critical DNA sites are identical in the corresponding human and chimp genes. With that close a relationship, the two living chimp species belong in the genus Homo, says Morris Goodman of Wayne State University in Detroit.
The closeness of relationship between chimps and humans has become an important issue outside taxonomy, becoming part of the debate over the use of chimps in laboratory experiments and over their conservation in the wild.
Traditionally chimps are classified with the other great apes, gorillas and orangutans, in the family Pongidae, separated from the human family Hominidae. Within Hominidae, most paleoanthropologists now class virtually all hominid fossils in three genera, Homo, Australopithecus, or Ardipithecus.
On the basis of the new study, Goodman would not only put modern humans and all fossils back to the human-chimp divergence into Homo, but would also include the common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobo (Pan paniscus).


The suggestion is that chimpanzees should be reclassified into the Homo genus:

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.


I guess another way of looking at the data is that very little genetic material makes a significant difference.

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