[Pharmboy]

So I am a monkey's (actually an ape's) uncle!

[Pharmboy]

Ping

[searchandrecovery]

I'm not a scientist, but my analysis of this article can only lead to the conclusion that this technology (knowledge, if you will) will someday lead to chimps that can talk. Imagine it, a world with chimps and humans living and working side-by-side.

This gene therapy will certainly be the nightmare of this upcoming century. If you thought the atom was a bad can o' worms to open, dear goodness, dna & gene research is way way way mo' bad. At least atomic research took a multi-billion dollar investment by a country - to do dna hacking only requires the tech and a small lab. Bad bad bad stuff ahead (next 50 years).

[Blueflag]

thread on same content from yesterday's FReerepublic

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1038243/posts

[aardvark1]

By comparing the human genome with that of chimpanzees, people's closest living relative

I can see it now when I go to fill out my next credit ap:

Name of nearest relative not living with you: Lancelot Link.

[aardvark1]

Humans and chimps shared a joint ancestor as recently as five million years ago.

I told my wife I was no where near that neighborhood 5 million years ago.

[scouse]

The project received a lift two years ago when a large London family with barely intelligible speech was found to have mutations in a gene called FOXP2.

Methinks this family must have been eating too much bushmeat.

[Blueflag]

Pharmboy--

do a google on deCODE Genetics. See their work on identifying 'genes'/ markers that point to a higher incidence of asthma, anxiety, obesity, etc.

This work is a combination of genome + phenome + geneology that is enabled by a quirk of Icelandic cultural behaviour - a fascination with the familiy tree.

Read (if you can stay awake) the book "Genome".

Anyway, once you get informed, you'll find that articles like the one above that try to say Chimps are nearly human really have an anthropromorphic agenda (perhaps founded on an affinity for PETA) that is not well-founded.

Believe me 12% is a HUGE difference in the sequence. You would not want to accept the outcome that your child would be born with a 0.1% difference in the parental sequence.

(Learn about haplotypes, e.g.) BTW, if you are up on all of this, please pardon me for perhaps patronizing you.

FRegards

[Doc Savage]

Don't you EVER compare me to AL Sharpton!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Doctor Stochastic]

More like a 32767th cousin,6561 times removed.

[Renfield]

Has anyone yet determined when Chimps split off from Democrats?

[ASA Vet]

a partial list of the genes that make people human.

Have they identified the one that made people invent and then believe in the supernatural?

[ZULU]

"Genes involved in recycling amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, have changed in the human line, the Science article reports. Those could reflect changes in diet when humanlike descendants of the mostly fruit-eating ancestor switched to meat."

Ergo, vegans are subhuman. Their meat-free diet adversely affects their humanity, leading to confusion about the distinctions between people and animals.

[HamiltonJay]

There is a HUGE difference in 2% of any large system.... for example, a HIGH END Sereo reciever vs a $49 boom box may have 98% identical components... but those 2% that are different cause the price to be 10 times more and produce music quality that the $49 dollar job could never accomplish.

A production crotch rocket can reach 140 MPH... while the professional racers reach 170MPH... that 30 extra MPH equates to $100,000 or more to produce vs the 7-10k for the production bike....

The reality is, a human is not a chimp, and a chimp is not a human... and while our DNA may share a LOT in terms of volume, they are basically admitting that 2% that is different makes far more than a 2% difference to the outcome.