ROTFLMHO!!! ok seriously I'm not even a scientist and I can tell you some MAJOR differances that can in NO WAY even suggest that we're cousins unless the person who published his "find" is the missing link...

No. 1 Chimps can't talk.
No. 2 Their skeletal makeup is different.
No. 3 Where is the chimp that was born to two human parents??
No. 4 Where is the human that was born to two chimp parents??
No. 5 To be of the same family it has to be possible to breed between them and bear children. Has that happened yet?? (Ahem What psycho would try??)
No. 6 Where are all the "in betweens"?? If it's true that we are all one big evolving happy family there should be millions of strange halfway-in-between-species and muddled up animals, fossils AND LIVING TODAY.

Have any of you seen a bear that had born a cougar kitten?? When you wait for chicks to hatch do you expect a lizard to come out?? If we evolved then evolution must sometimes have throwbacks so where are those?? How many of you have farms or breed dogs or have barn cats?? Have they ever produced babies of another kind??

The article is talking about moving chimps from the genus Pan to the genus Homo. Being in the same genus is not the same as being in the same species. The species boundary is defined as a male/female pair being able to produce young, two or more species can be in the same genus but you can't have species within or outside the same genus breeding. A genus is just a way to group like species, the art, as these researchers are quibbling about, is defining how much similarity constitutes a genus change.

Nobody is suggesting that chimps have human (homo sapien sapien) offspring or that humans have chimps. That, as you point out, is absurd.

My thread subject was misleading, I didn't mean to suggest that chimps are humans, just close in terms of genetic sequences. With some of the apeish things people do, perhaps we ought to be members of Pan.... dry humor.... ha ...ha....

If we evolved then evolution must sometimes have throwbacks so where are those??

Good question a common example is the whale whos ancestors went from being marine based, to land based, back to marine over eons. Evolution does not state that changes in a species must be "progressive", only that change happens and those changes that survive over time are those that offer the ability to produce and support more off spring.

Sounds iffy and politically charged to me, but I might agree with it provided some of the people in the world get moved into Pan. :smile:

hehe sorry I suppose I WAS going off half cocked I didn't really look up anything so yeah...I just get really passionate whenever they say I'm related to monkeys (however they might wanna put it)so yeah but still they're NOT even close to being "related" to humans. hehe I'll look up stuff now BEFORE I post it...

No need to apologize, Billii. Evolution is a passionate topic, although it wasn't something I was driving at with this post.

It was simply interesting to me (and funny) that bulk estimates on genetic makeup are being used to group species. This is merely drawing arbitrary lines in sand, while being in the middle of a shifting desert. Where to place chimps in the taxonomy of life is more a question of semantics (and politics as Ex suggests) than deriving some deep understanding of our evolution. Human relationships to chimps (in evolutionary terms) is little effected whether they are in Pan or Homo....

[ This Message was edited by: bitmasher on 2003-05-25 21:52 ]

So what would be the point of moving them?? I mean they're still going to be chimps...it's not like if they did move them that they'd suddenly become different.

O.o

Wow, timing is perfect! My science class is learning about evolution and so forth... My opinion: If we came from or evolved from chimps why wouldnt there be chimp still "CHANGING" today and would you see at least a few in the "Half/Half stage?" Like a chimp that walks upright and has a face similar to ours but still cant speak...so on so forth...

There is...he's my brother - LOL.

That's pretty good Saskie, hope your brother doesn't thump you for that one.

I'll share a story that I'm familar with and you that read this can make of it what you want.

Snake venom immobilizes its prey by injecting a protein into the blood stream that binds directly to the open channel of acetylcholine receptors. The acetylcholine receptor is nothing but a tiny pump that allows an ion balancing across a membrane that is used for muscle contraction. By binding to the receptor the venom blocks ion flow, immobilizing the muscles. Paralyzis of the diaphragm (a big muscle) causes breathing to stop.

The mongoose as some may recall is immune to snake bites and even can feed on cobras. Why isn't the mongoose's receptors effected by the venom like most all other mammals? It turns out that there is a one base pair difference in the mongoose gene (a snippet of DNA) that codes for the acetylcholine receptor of the mongoose compared to the same gene in other animals. This slight difference causes a different amino acid to be substituted into the receptor which makes the receptor fold just slightly different. This slight difference creates a "lip" on the receptor that prevents the venom protein from binding.

DNA is composed of 4 building blocks, symbolized as: A, G, C and T. If you were to write out the entire mongoose DNA sequence it would fill a volume of books greater than several copies of the encyclopedia brittanica. Just GGCTAAGTCA... and so on.

Imagine that volume of books that represents the DNA of the mongoose. The "mutation" that conferred the ability to block snake venom is JUST ONE LETTER! One letter, that's it!

Furthermore consider a "broke" mongoose (one not immune to snake venom), one that does not have this single base pair switched. You would not be able to tell it from a regular mongoose by looks alone. A broke and regular mongoose would interbred (they are still the same species). For all intensive purposes they are identical except when tangling with a snake.

The point of this rambling? Tiny changes in the DNA sequence can have thunderous changes in the animal. Most of which cannot be seen or necessarily create a new species.

So where did this mutation this single base pair shift come from in the mongoose? Point mutations (as these single base pair changes are called) come from several sources, the most important of which is during the division stage of creating the cells that are used for reproduction. Basically there is an internal process in reproduction that introduces randomness which can cause these differences. Minor perturbations of DNA and the resulting changes on the life form it codes for is the engine that drives evolution. For the sake of arguement I define evolution as "the changing form of life".