Chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor, and even today 99 percent of the two species' DNA is identical...

[Analog]

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor, and even today 99 percent of the two species' DNA is identical. But since the paths of man and chimp diverged 5 million years ago, that one percent of genetic difference appears to have changed humans in an unexpected way: It could have made people more prone to cancer.

A comparative genetic study led by Cornell University researchers suggest that some mutations in human sperm cells might allow them to avoid early death and reproduce, creating an advantage that ensures more sperm cells carry this trait. But this same positive selection could also have made it easier for human cancer cells to survive.

"If we are right about this, it may help explain the high prevalence of cancer," says Rasmus Nielsen, lead author of the paper, and a former assistant professor of the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell who is now a professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The study, published in a recent issue of PLoS Biology (Vol. 3, Issue 6), a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), focuses on identifying biological processes where positive selection -- adaptations that lead to new directions -- produced evolutionary changes that can be identified in the genomes of both humans and chimps.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May05/Chimps.kr.html

 

[DaTT]

I know of a few chimps that post in here.

 

[markgm]

This explains a lot then.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Well these guys are poor molecular geneticists if they are so suprised. Organisms reproduce, metabolize etc.

Just being alive necessitates the the vast majority of DNA be similiar. In fact it is how people identify what genes do. They find a sequence, and check against a known database. If a gene produces a particular product in yeast, it will do the same in humans.

It isn't the blueprint, it's the variation that makes us what we are.

 

[StageLeft]

I didn't realize how close humans and monkeys were until I had a baby. Skoorbaby is perfectly normal, but you'd have to be brain dead not to see behavioural similarities between a baby and the stupid crap you see chimpanzees and orangutan do. Anyway, that's my input

 

[Nitemare]

Originally posted by: DaTT
I know of a few chimps that post in here.

<---takes your banana away and climbs up a tree

 

[Gibsons]

From reading that link, the comments about cancer and cell survival are all just speculation by the original authors. They simply looked at what genes have the most divergence and found that apoptotic genes diverged a lot. It looks like they didn't do any functional studies to test this hypothesis (in fact I'd bet on it). It's possible but extremely unlikely that their are known phenotypic differences in the divergent sequences.