Word: chimp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
Scientists didn't need to wait for the chimp genome tobegin 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...
...nonfunctional elements in the precise spot where they can be found on the chromosomes of lower animals. If God was creating humans afresh, Collins asked, "why would he insert a pseudo-gene that has lost its ability to do anything in the same place that it appears in a chimp?" Barring evolution, "you're forced to the conclusion that God was trying to mislead us and test our faith - and I have trouble with that kind of conjecture." (See the top 10 Jesus films of all time...
...more closely related to chimpanzees by 1.5 million years,” says David E. Reich, an HMS assistant professor of genetics.Reich says the data suggests that rather than following the traditional view of speciation, in which populations split and are isolated for long periods of time, the human-chimp split involved a “long, drawn-out period of genetic exchange between populations.”The next step for the team is to test whether the human-chimpanzee relationship is an exception or part of a larger pattern.While this sort of hybridization is not an accepted mainstream...