Evolution Study Tightens Human-Chimp Connection

[ToSeek]

Evolution Study Tightens Human-Chimp Connection

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found genetic evidence that seems to support a controversial hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees may be more closely related to each other than chimps are to the other two species of great apes – gorillas and orangutans. They also found that humans evolved at a slower rate than apes.

[Gillianren]

Well, that last makes sense to me. After all, humans would logically have different evolutionary pressures than chimps--aren't we also longer-lived, with more time between generations? All things considered, I'd be surprised if we didn't evolve slower.

[Hugh Jass]

Huh? I thought this was actually already well accepted. I'd seen some paper somewhere quite a while ago distancing orangutans, more recently, the last time I saw primate phylogeny, gorillas split then chimps and humans a bit later, or rather for correctness what would become chimps and what would become humans. I'll try and find the one I saw, in the mean time, this one seems to have already been accepting this as true.

[Disinfo Agent]

Looking at the article, it seems that the interesting part of the discovery has to do with what they call "generation time". Perhaps this is the bit that's controversial:

"I think we can say that this study provides further support for the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees should be in one genus, rather than two different genus’ because we not only share extremely similar genomes, we share similar generation time,” said Yi.

[Hugh Jass]

oooh... guess in my skimming of the article I swept right over that.