Tuesday, April 19, 2005

SCIENCE and CULTURE/SOCIETY: Humans, chimps, men, women and genetics

I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but I kept forgetting. I heard an interesting piece of information on the radio a couple of months back.

If you keep up on genetics or evolution, then you probably know that humans and chimps share 98.5% of the same dna. It's only 1.5% that makes us different from chimps.

Well, according to this report I heard, human males and females share 97% of the same dna and 3% is different. Obviously, that 3% is not the same as the 3% that is different from chimps. It's different dna that's different, if that makes any sense.

But still...this means that human females or males are as close to each other genetically as chimps and humans. And in my mind, this explains A LOT!

NPR story with the genetic comparison

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