Turn a woman into a monkey?
Were you watching Red Dwarf last week?
The genetic button that could turn a WOMAN into a CHIMPANZEE
Certain regulatory mechanisms in genes are all that's stopping the human race from turning into monkeys, boffins have found. Humans share over 90 per cent of their DNA with primates, but mankind has somewhat different biology and behaviour. To get that difference from the same genetic soup, the activity of the genes has to …
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 13:27 GMT James Micallef
Wrong direction?
"Certain regulatory mechanisms in genes are all that's stopping the human race from turning into monkeys, boffins have found"
wouldn't it be equally correct to say
"Certain regulatory mechanisms in genes are all that's stopping apes from turning into humans, boffins have found"
??
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Friday 9th November 2012 17:39 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Wrong direction?
...wouldn't it be equally correct to say...
Yes, in the sense that both are completely incorrect. In neither case could an individual of one species "turn into" an individual of another species.
A somewhat better phrasing would be something like "epigenetic mechanisms distinguish among closely-related primate species".
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 13:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Chimpanzees are not monkeys
I thought Terry Pratchett had by now informed most technically-educated non-biologists that orangs, chimpanzees and gorillas are NOT monkeys. They are apes...a lot more like us.
The author ought to suffer the fate of people making a similar mistake in Pratchett's books, i.e. to be bounced up and down on their heads till they get the point.
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 13:55 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: Chimpanzees are not monkeys
Equally importantly, once the button switching a human being into an orangutan has been pressed, they result ape DOES NOT WANT IT TO BE SWITCHED BACK!!
EEEEK!!
as the librarian tends to say when this is suggested (either that or he bounces your head on the cobblestones a few times).
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Friday 9th November 2012 17:42 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Chimpanzees are not monkeys
Of course they are not (and I hope most educated people knew this before they read Pratchett[1]), but the study and the article also refer to rhesus monkeys, which, as the name suggests, are monkeys. There's no reason to believe that the phrasing of the first paragraph refers to chimpanzees rather than rhesus (or other) monkeys.
[1] Not that there's anything wrong with reading Pratchett - but it's not a substitute for a basic education in zoological taxonomy. (Pity he's never asked me to blurb any of his books, because "Fine novel, but not a substitute for a basic education in zoological taxonomy" would look great on the back cover.)
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 13:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
If it were only that simple
I wish I had a penny for every genetic research group that made made outlandish claims of "if we could only" and make it so easy as to take a simple pill.
Remember telomere lengthening and the cure for ageing ? I'm willing to bet I will be in the ground at least a millennium before anyone gets even near cracking genetic ageing.
Imagine the complexity of writing a distributed parallel program to run on all the worlds computers simultaneously in analogue and you have some idea of the genome and the reactions involved.
Getting biochemical reactions to occur in vitro is a crapshoot, never mind trying it in a live human test subject
Hey physicists I'm still waiting for the promised nuclear fusion we were to get in the 1970s.
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 13:45 GMT DJV
Readability
Blimey! 7 paragraphs and a total of 9 sentences. Several gramatical errors. Did anyone actually proofread that article?
I chucked it through the readability test at:
http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp
which scored the readability as very low at 36.11.
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 14:24 GMT Curly4
Great opportunity
If a woman could be turned into a monkey it seams to me that the reverse should also work. This should be more true than going into the reverse direction since it has already happened before. So now is the time to take advantage of this great opportunity to direct the evolution of one of the precursors of humanity to human. Some may think that there is some ethical concerns in doing this. This would be true if man DID NOT EVOLVE in the first place. If humanity did evolve then this would only nature getting a little help to speed up the process.
So now I wish for happy evolution to the person to come.
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 14:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Great opportunity
No it has not!
Apes are not our ancestors, as should be blindingly obvious. They are closely related species around at the same time as us (despite our efforts). They are not precursors of humanity; they are on alternative evolutionary paths. Being a chimpanzee is not in some magical evolutionary way inferior to being human, but different. My dog doesn't feel inferior to me, except that I am his pack leader. I really don't think dogs would be improved if we expanded their brains and taught them about fringe banking. Or even Javascript.
Furthermore evolution is not directed towards producing humans. A quick census by biomass suggests that if it is directed towards anything, it's producing bacteria, fungi, and green plants in that order.
So many mistakes about basic biology in one post, you could probably get space on one of those US websites that thinks the Flintstones was a science programme. Alternatively, read the excellent books by Jay Gould and get the basics of an education in evolutionary biology.
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 19:51 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: evolution is not directed towards producing humans.
See e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1751 (in particular fig.2, evolution of nose size by Myr)
Paleontological Tests: Human-like Intelligence is not a Convergent Feature of Evolution
Charles H. Lineweaver
We critically examine the evidence for the idea that encephalization quotients increase with time. We find that human-like intelligence is not a convergent feature of evolution. Implications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are discussed.
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Thursday 8th November 2012 05:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Great opportunity
And what of this common ancestor for ape and human? I'd be really interested to see the fossil record for this one! Do we have evidence or conjecture?
I know, its Y not X, but are we suggesting that women are quite close to apes but men are not? Can you have one half of a species closely related but the other half not?
" … 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation."
- Hughes, J.F. et al., , "Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content", Nature 463:536–539, 2010. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/nature08700.html)
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 16:37 GMT Scott Broukell
All very well but .....
... they got into space before human apes. We men failed to notice the subtle and ingenious ways by which we were unwittingly coerced into developing space flight and then before you know it we launched apes into space first*. Naturally the sole purpose was just to see the lovely view from up there and once that was done we (men) continued tinkering in the space-age garden shed of bliss unabated. Go ape-women of the world !
*(well dogs and cats and some mice as well probably but you get the gist)
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 17:35 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Its a lot
closer than you think
Come to the factory where I work and you'll see a bunch of monkeys attempting to operate the machines.(roughly translated: ****ing everything thing up every 5 seconds even the job we designed as un****able)
And why does the boss only hire monkeys? because he pays peanuts
<<grabbing coat and running for it
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Wednesday 7th November 2012 21:55 GMT GBE
Turn woman into gorilla: it's been done
Over here in the US, "woman turning into a gorilla" used to be a pretty standard carnival/fair side-show attraction (dunno if they still do it). There's a line of patter about a scientist doing research in Africa and accidental discovery of a serum that causes a person to change back and forth between human and gorilla. There's an attactive woman (in a bikini of course) standing in a large cage. After the build-up, she gradually transforms into a "gorilla", and starts shaking the bars of the cage, which of course, come undone and she escapes -- roaring and threatening the audience. When properly staged and presented, it's actually quite entertaining.
Hint: they do it with a partially silvered mirror and some dimmable lights...
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Thursday 8th November 2012 00:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeah, brilliant discovery
But if you write a computer program that's 90% like another computer program but with random additions, and then run them both, you'll probably find the execution paths diverge pretty rapidly and the output is completely different.
Which is pretty much what they claim to have discovered.
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