Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

Chimp Laboratory Immunity

15:48 / 22.05.03

Chimps are human, gene study implies
Jeff Hecht
NewScientist.com news service

Link

A really interesting article, but one of the reasons us humans have for the importance of examining this issue is questonable.

Quote: The closeness of relationship between chimps and humans has become an important issue outside taxonomy, becoming part of the debate over the use of chimps in laboratory experiments and over their conservation in the wild.

So, if you are a part of our crew, then you've got immunity from being abused in the lab for human scientific endeavour, as well as protection from being obliterated in the wild. To hell with the rest of them?
That sounds like bad ethics.

16:45 / 22.05.03

Hmm. Not entirely convinced of them being us, or would it not be them doing the study about humans and chimps? But does it make testing on them right? Does it fuck

19:40 / 22.05.03

In that issue of New Scientist, while mentioning the danger of favouritism among the primates, suggested an alternative:

"we could get rid of the exclusive hominid club altogether by declaring ourselves members of a new, enlarged pongid family."

Admittedly though, as the article says, there is no "gold standard" to measure genetic similarities, so the results are somewhat subjective.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

22:27 / 23.05.03

I don't like the argument of genetics being applied to classification.
For a start, the old taxonomy system is geared around anatomy. There are some pretty profound anatomical differences between chimps and people, most notably the hair but also the jaw, skull, lower skeleton and feet are sufficiently different to rule them out as being in the same genus, I think.

Howver they are most certainly mis-classified animals, being in the same genus as gorillas and orang-utans.

I beleive that older studies have show that we are more closely related to the gorillas than chimps are, genetically. The lineage of gorillas split away from the same lineage as humans and chimps. The older, less detailed genetic studies of great apes showed that we are 98% chimp. We are also 97% gorilla, and so is a chimp 97% gorilla. So we are more comparable to the chimp than the chimp is comparable to the gorilla, ie. there are more genetic differences between a chimp and a gorilla than there are between a chimp and a human. If this translates into anatomical differences (which it doesn't, and remember the studies are now out-dated and less detailed than the one in the link above) then the chimp should be more at home in the genus 'Hominidae' with us than in 'Pongidae' with the gorilla and the orang-utan.

Mind you, it could be simply that gorillas and orang-utans are mis-classified, and there should be a speparate genus for chimps and their relatives, another for humans and their ancestral species, and yet another for the gorillas.

17:19 / 27.05.03

Some of this discussion has already taken place here, which I post here mainly so more people will read about the sexual prowess of the male chimpanzee.

I beleive that older studies have show that we are more closely related to the gorillas than chimps are, genetically.

That's flip-flopped back and forth a bit. I think the current knowledge has chimps as closer than gorillas, but that could be wrong.

One of the tricky things, by the way, with past taxonomy was that indigenous people in Borneo and the sub-Saharan jungles referred to great apes the same way they did to other foreign tribes. "Orang-utan" means "wild man of the woods"; until they were studied up close, European explorers thought gorillas were actually a tribe of humans related to the Pygmies. (As a note, Congolese soldiers are still killing and eating Pygmies. This probably says more about the humanity of the Congolese soldiers than it does the Pygmies.)

22:27 / 27.05.03

As far as i am aware all of the latest molecular studies conclude that chimpanzees are the closest relatives of humans although it is thought that the divergence of gorillas was only shortly (in evolutionary time) before the divergence of chimpanzees and humans leading to the earlier confusion about our family tree. Studies of soft tissue anatomy have also supported this human chimpanzee relationship.

Interestinly Carolus Linnaeus the founder of modern taxonmy considered chimpanzees to be in the same genus as humans naming them Homo troglodytes, so this idea dates back to the 18th cenury!