Wow! I can't believe I really did manage to glide through the whole day at work. And people here didn't even notice that I am unwell. The lunch meeting with my supervisors went well, although we didn't manage to finish editing the manuscript, as both of them had other appointments lining up right after lunch. Anyway, I'll have to buckle down now as there are additional suggestions and instructions given by them. That's why I'm still tarrying at work instead of going home to catch some sleep. *sigh* Nah, actually the slack gal’s just dawdling here. Guess what she discovered while browsing the web? Here you go.....
The genome of one of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) was completed. This news is the front cover of the latest issue of Nature (Volume 437 Number 7055 pp1-168), one of the most prestigious international scientific journals.
It’s rather amazing when science has proven to us that we share up to 98% of our DNA and almost all of our genes with chimpanzee. Yet when we look at them and compared to our appearance, well, it’s pretty difficult to relate our close relationship, right? You know what? Now we know what's this 2% difference between us and the chimps, we are notorious egotists. *lol*
Actually according to many research and observations performed on chimpanzees, they are similar to humans in many ways: they are socially complex, sensitive and communicative, and yet indisputably on the animal side of the man/beast divide. Gosh, sounds a little unreal right? With the genetic code of our closest living relative sequenced, scientists can now show the striking concordances and diverges between the chimps and us and perhaps it will further hold up a mirror to our own humanity.
I haven’t had the time to read all the contents. There are other articles written in this issue focusing on certain aspects that you may find appealing. Below are some excerpts from Nature.
Half a century of dedicated field research has brought us from ignorance of our closest relatives to the discovery that chimpanzee communities resemble human cultures in possessing suites of local traditions that uniquely identify them.
Although humans have nuclear families, chimpanzees are promiscuous. *em, really?? Is that speaking for all humans?*.......This promiscuous mating system explains the intense sexual rivalry among males as well as the size of their testes. Corrected for body size, chimpanzee testes are about 10 times larger than those of our own species. As females have multiple sex partners, sperm competition is likely. …..Human evolution has placed strong curbs on sexual competition, which may have been achieved by making mate choice less open-ended.
We share with chimpanzees’ and other animals’ core aspects of folk mathematics and psychology.
With the new discovery of science in this aspect, it has definitely opened the door for us in understanding the nature, our companions and ourselves.
Science is so interesting! Woohoohoo, I’m such a science devotee. By the way, if you are not into science, but a freak of interactive graphic/animal lover/fan of movie, whatever, you can go to Chimp genome special for free access of interactive graphics, features, movie (chimpanzee behaviour) and a roll call of famous chimps ex cetera.
Hope you’ll learn something new today. I just did. Happy browsing!
♥ every page of my imagination
