Word: chimp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Anthropomorphism isn't, after all, just for laypeople. Primatologist Jane Goodall broke with convention and gave her chimps names quite deliberately. "I don't think people would have been as interested if [chimp] David Graybeard had been No. 29," she told USA Today. Sentiment is not a bad trait in a dominant species. Sometimes it can be all that keeps us in line...
...during the 1995-96 season, he rapidly pulled off the difficult trick of being both favored by the writers (he was often in 30 of the 40 sketches prepared for the show) and beloved by his hypercompetitive castmates. "When I got there, I played Jane Goodall to his chimp," says SNL's Amy Poehler, who is Ferrell's archnemesis in Blades of Glory. "I studied him because a) he's a supergreat human being and b) he reminds you how fun it can be to make movies or be on live TV. He never seems nervous. Bill Murray always seemed...
...finished plots--a man who gets treated for cancer and survives, only to find that unscrupulous doctors have patented his family's cancer-resistant cell line and are trying to harvest it by force from his relatives. Also, a scientist who inadvertently crosses his genes with that of a chimp and creates a talking monkey. And some other scientist who comes up with a gene-therapy treatment that makes irresponsible people more mature. Had enough? No? There's a transgenic parrot that does math and quotes old movies...
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...
...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...