Comments on: How did Mark Henderson, of The Times, interpret that chimps are more evolved?

By: How chimpanzee and human diets affect gene expression « Anthropology.net

How chimpanzee and human diets affect gene expression « Anthropology.net — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 06:40:22 +0000

[...] In the Gilad paper, he and his coauthors used novel gene-array technology to measure the extent of gene expression in thousands of genes simultaneously. Their study showed that as humans diverged from their ape ancestors in the last five million or so years, genes for transcription factors, which are proteins that control gene expression, were four times as likely to have changed their own expression patterns as the genes they regulate. So basically any small changes in the expression of these regulatory genes can have an enormous impact, because they influence the activity of their downstream gene product. I’m not one toot my own horn, but if you are still confused by this summary I apologize… I don’t have a better way to explain what and how differential gene expression is better than this comment I left in April 2007. [...]

By: Gene Regulation, the driving force in Human Evolution « Anthropology.net

Gene Regulation, the driving force in Human Evolution « Anthropology.net — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:33:49 +0000

[...] is actually pretty common knowledge… it even came up in a discussion on our other blog, Primatology.net way back in March of this [...]

By: The Human Mutation - a mutation in neuropsin is found only in humans « Primatology.org

Wed, 09 May 2007 05:14:49 +0000

[...] brains and compares that to chimpanzees. This form of comparison is important. Often, I’ve told people that, while it maybe significant that chimpanzees and humans share a remarkable amount of genomic [...]

By: Kambiz

Kambiz — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 04:01:01 +0000

Doug, you’re on the right track.

You’re dead on about addressing how the concept of chimpanzee and human genome similarities is mildly misrepresented. While 98% similarities may sound very significant, the 2% is millions of base pairs and can be possibly hundreds close thousands of genes.

Also, almost all living organisms contain homologous genes that make a cell, for example, and surprisingly that’s a lot of our genes. So we share a lot of genes also with the common mouse as well as nematodes.

But where we differ, and how massive developmental changes are made is in the patterns in which these genes are activated and transcribed into a product. That process raises a whole new level of complexity and points of differentiation that sequence homology does not [yet] address.

In that manner, sharing sequence homology is only the tip of the massive iceberg that is comparing genomes and phenomes.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:30:02 +0000

This is as maddening as all the newspaper and TV accounts shouting, “The chimp has 98% the same genes that humans have, and therefore they’re not much different from us…” I would make this analogy. Suppose you wanted to write a complete set of instructions on how to build a building. This would include many volumes on how to find dig rocks out of the ground to find iron ore, and coal etc. to make steel to make nails. How to make hammers, shovels, bulldozers, bricks…how to make paper to write the instructions down…. 98% of the total instruction volumes could be devoted to the gathering of materials. But the 2% engineering and planning instructions would be crucial to the conception of the building project. So too, a very small subset of genes could make a phenomenal difference in the functioning of intelligent planning.