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Once again the media blows the reporting of a scientific study big time. This story way over exaggerates the findings.

Here's the link and abstract to the actual study.

Accelerated Evolution of Nervous System Genes in the Origin of Homo sapiens

Human evolution is characterized by a dramatic increase in brain size and complexity. To probe its genetic basis, we examined the evolution of genes involved in diverse aspects of nervous system biology. We found that these genes display significantly higher rates of protein evolution in primates than in rodents. Importantly, this trend is most pronounced for the subset of genes implicated in nervous system development. Moreover, within primates, the acceleration of protein evolution is most prominent in the lineage leading from ancestral primates to humans. Thus, the remarkable phenotypic evolution of the human nervous system has a salient molecular correlate, i.e., accelerated evolution of the underlying genes, particularly those linked to nervous system development. In addition to uncovering broad evolutionary trends, our study also identified many candidate genes—most of which are implicated in regulating brain size and behavior—that might have played important roles in the evolution of the human brain.

I have a Science Direct account and read the whole study.

A couple of things

1) This 'extraordinarily fast' evolution they are talking about occurred over 25 million years!!!!!

2) In the actual study, They compared only human and macaques and not humans & chimps because as they put it

Quote "To obtain evolutionary rates in primates, we compared sequences between human and the Old World monkey, macaque. We note that even though much discussion of human evolution has focused on human-chimpanzee comparisons, the strong sequence similarities between these two species results in high stochastic uncertainty in the estimation of evolutionary rates".

So they are basically talking about the whole ape line not just humans. If they did this study with chimps or gorillas and macaques they would have gotten the same results. So despite the sensational headlines of this article there is nothing in this study to suggest that somehow humans evolved (for lack of better words) in a more "special way" (thus hinting at some sort of ID) than any other ape.

3) They only compared the evolution of human/Macaque vs mouse/rat brains, who knows if other families might have actually had more brain evolution (i.e. elephants, dolphins, etc)

4) Interesting thing in the study: The Human(ape) line split from the Macaque line and the rat line split from mouse line both about 25 million years ago. But despite the "fast" evolution of the Human brain, Humans overall are still more genetically similar to macaques than rats are to mice. So for all this talk about 'extraordinarily fast' evolution, rats still over all evolved much faster/more than humans did over the same time period. (which since they breed so darn fast is to be expected under the T.O.E.)