Chad's New and Hot Week 3 (What's with all the Chimps this week?)

“Chimps are ahead of humans in the great evolutionary race”

According to a study performed at the University of Michigan and published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it appears that chimpanzees possess more genes that show signs of ‘positive selection,’ or quick evolution because of an adaptive benefit in the environment. By this method of genetic evaluation, the article claims that chimpanzees have essentially evolved further than humans have from our common ancestor. This raises many interesting questions regarding the reasons for evolutionary mutations and the idea that “more intelligent species are ‘more evolved’.” The claims made by this article also call into question the effects that human society and technology have had on human evolution throughout mankind's recorded history.

“In the study, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers compared 14,000 human and chimp genes to see how they had been affected by evolution since the split. They particularly looked for genes that showed evidence of positive selection — those that had evolved quickly because of an adaptive benefit in the environment — rather than those that had changed more slowly by random genetic drift. They found 154 human genes that showed evidence of the rapid positive selection that marks out adaptive traits, but 233 chimp genes with the same qualities.”

The full text of the article can be found here.