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[Alice Gilmore <AGilmore AT dynetech.com>]

Title: Study: Chimps more human than other apes"

Study: Chimps more human than ape

The Associated Press
Posted May 20, 2003
 
WASHINGTON -- Chimpanzees are more closely related to people than to gorillas or other primates and probably should be included in the human branch of the family tree, a research team says.

The idea, sure to spark renewed debate about evolution and the relationship between humans and animals, comes from a team at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

 
Currently, humans are alone in the genus Homo, which means "man." But lead researcher Morris Goodman argues, "We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzeelike apes." He says humans and chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA, the molecule that codes for life.

The report is being published in today's online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The battle over how humans are related to chimps, gorillas and other monkeys has raged since 1859, when Charles Darwin described evolution in On the Origin of Species.

The dispute between religious and scientific factions got its greatest publicity in 1925, when Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution.

And it continues to this day: Kansas reinstated the teaching of evolution in 2001 -- 18 months after the state school board voted to drop it from classes. Alabama's school board voted to put stickers on biology books warning that evolution is controversial.

Goodman's team didn't address evolution directly but proposed that humans and chimps be considered branches of the same genus because of their similarities.

A genus is a group of closely related species. While the human species, Homo sapiens, stands alone in the genus Homo, there have been other species on the branch, such as Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal man.

Chimpanzees are in the genus Pan, along with bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees.

Goodman's proposal would establish three species under Homo: Homo sapiens, or humans; Homo troglodytes, or common chimpanzees; and Homo paniscus, or bonobo chimpanzees.

There is no official board in charge of placing animals in their various genera, and in some cases alternative classifications are available.

"If enough people get agitated by this and think it's something to be dealt with, there may be a symposium that takes this as the central issue and determines if this is a reasonable proposal," Goodman said. "I think it's a reasonable proposal, of course, or I wouldn't have proposed it."

Genes from humans and chimps most closely resembled each other, followed by orangutans and Old World monkeys, the researchers found.

Richard J. Sherwood, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, is skeptical.

The fact that chimps and humans are closely related and share a common ancestor about 7 million years ago is well known, Sherwood said, but that doesn't mean they belong in the same genus now.

Walt Brown of the Center for Scientific Creation in Phoenix argues that because the sequencing of human and chimpanzee DNA is not complete, saying people and chimps are that much alike is "baloney."

"We have similarities with chimpanzees, but there are a heck of a lot of differences, too," Brown said.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press