Damn Dirty Ape

That’s a quote from Charlton Heston’s character “George Taylor” in the movie Planet of the Apes. He said it forty-two years ago but it still rings true for me.  While some part of me likes to watch the shenanigans of a bunch of ruckusie monkeys at the zoo, fundamentally I think they are just nasty animals.  Oddly enough, I might be a bit disgusted with apes at the zoo because I am latently holding them to some near-human social standard of decency, which is the point of this blog entry: are apes like human or are we not that close in reality?

Recently in a conversation at work the topic of monkeys came up.  Specifically, someone said something silly about monkeys and I think I said something about “dirty monkeys” which evoked a confession out of me with regard to my general disdain for those creatures (based on a childhood traumatic observation at a zoo… I will leave that to your imagination.) A co-worker thought it was ironic that I disliked them so much since they had heard we share the most genetic material with monkeys (or apes) as compared to any other animal in the animal kingdom. This made me curious so naturally I felt the need to do a little research.

She was right and wrong.  Let me explain.  Most of the people I know think of one of two kinds of primates when someone starts talking about how humans are like primates or if they say we came from monkeys.

First, they might think about a chimpanzee like Michael Jackson’s chimp Bubbles. Just seeing those big brown eyes looking at you while the little sucker sits on Jackson’s hip like a human baby clinging to its mother could cause anyone to over-identify sociologically speaking.

Next up, people often think about the Primatologist Jane Goodall and the apes she lived with in the jungle. While Jane primarily worked with chimps and chimps are classified in the family of “great apes,” the greatest of the apes were classified as gorillas, and gorillas due to their size and intelligence are often most frequently thought of when people think about coming from monkeys… uh, I mean apes, since monkeys are only cousins to apes within the primate family. Oddly enough, neither the chimp nor the apes, nor the super-intelligent great apes are what scientists think of when they say that we share genetic material with primates.

What people should be thinking about is Clint Eastwood and the famous orangutan Clyde when they ponder sharing anything with primates.  And technically, we don’t share genetic material with primates. Our genes are not what make us similar in reality.  It is our DNA that makes us similar, but how similar are we?

The first number I’ve heard is that our DNA is 98% similar. Today we think of Jane Goodall stories or chimps dressed in clothes or acting in movies or TV shows (like Gilligan’s Island) and we instinctively say “Makes sense to me!  People have been saying we come from the same family for some time now, so it only makes sense.” But back in the mid 1970s when the study was first completed at UC Berkley, scientists were actually shocked that orangutans shared so much DNA. Up until that point the notion that we shared an ancient ancestor was based on speculation and observed similarities. Matching DNA sure seems like a smoking gun for those who believe we are cousins. Which, of course, had me asking the next obvious question: didn’t we only recently map the human Genome / DNA?

For those who are still paying attention, the human Genome map was completed in the year 2000. It began in 1990 and ten years later a working draft (later to be formally published in 2003) was presented to the world. And now a recent study coming out of Uppsala, Sweden, is demonstrating that the similarity is now more like 95%, double the gap that we previously thought it was according to David Nelson, a geneticist from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. So how is it that scientists at Berkley were declaring our DNA 98% similar to orangutans in the 1970s but we didn’t really know what was in our DNA for 33 more years?

To understand better what it is we actually understand about DNA you have to have just a little more understanding about what was actually researched in the Human Genome project. To study DNA, scientists would examine certain sequences of 20 different amino acids (in groups of three at a time) that make up elements of proteins within humans. To put it all in perspective this means scientists had to understand what was going on with something like 3 billion nucleotides, in sequence no less. This study resulted in identifying factors that influence physical attributes. In the end only a small percentage of the DNA seemed to explain genetic influence while much of the Genome study didn’t yield a huge revelation as to what certain nucleotide purpose was. It is within that smaller number of influential DNA results that we appear to be similar to orangutans, and the more we study it the further apart we appear from primates. Is the remaining gap between us significant or not?

I remember seeing a picture of the Grand Canyon as a kid. Because there were no reference points in the photo to give me a real idea of how large the canyon was (and I didn’t know what a canyon was) I wasn’t too impressed.  At that time an entertainer named Evil Knievel was talking about strapping himself to a motorcycle and rocketing himself across the chasm. Again, I wasn’t too impressed.  At the time I said, “I think I could launch across that on my huffy!?” My friend had to crack open an encyclopedia to show me a few more photos of the Grand Canyon to put it in perspective for me. Please allow me to point out a few reference points to put the gap between human and orangutan DNA in perspective.

Reference Point #1:  We still refer to the 98% similar percentage which comes from the earlier more crude study where human DNA was “hybridized” with orangutan DNA (ie. nothing at all like the Genome Project and the study of the purpose of nucleotides) As the human DNA was broken into a single strand and hybridized with orangutan DNA the test results were thought to be due to the similarities between the DNA (which we know now isn’t a very scientific conclusion.) Beyond that, not unlike the missing scientific study data and climatology models in question during the recent Climategate, the original scientists Sibley and Ahlquist were sloppy with their data and records.  People mostly had to rely on faith that the studies said what they did and that these two scientists were drawing reasonable conclusions. So if we were basing our closeness on a map that could show the relative location of humans and primates (specifically orangutans and more recently chimp DNA), then we weren’t working with a google map using satellite imagery.  We were working with hand drawn maps as told by two guys who were there and we mostly had to take their word for it.

Reference Point #2: It took us more than a decade perform all of the sequencing studies in the Human Genome project.  How long did it take us to map orangutan DNA so we knew we were working with equally well analyzed DNA on the orangutan side of the test?  Shockingly, there is no complete Orangutan Genome project. One was completed in 2008, but the comparisons aren't bringing humans closer to primates. This raises reasonable questions about how well we could compare the influential DNA of two creatures, one of which we don’t know nearly as well as the other (and the one we do know and did study for 13 years didn’t render a very high resolution mapping in the end.) Again, remember that as additional studies come out, we are getting an increasingly higher-definition view of the Human Genome as well as the orangutan Genome and at each turn we find we are further away from each other.

Reference Point #3: if the Human Genome project effectively showed us that a human DNA cell contains 3 billion base pairs, we are told that this equals something like 1,000 books of information where each book is about the size of an encyclopedia. This means that if we were 96% similar with regard to influential DNA, then the difference between us would be equal to 40 of those encyclopedia books of genetic information. Remember that if we came from the same ancestor (we didn’t come from monkeys and they didn’t come from us, but some claim we were to have come from a common ancestor about 3 million years ago) then these books simply contain a record of our differences.  So the real question is, is 3 million years enough time to account for 40 encyclopedias of differences? 

Interestingly enough, there is a new expert on the scene who might have something to say about 40 encyclopedias of differences created over the course of 3 million years. 

Everyone, meet Homo Floresiensis, nicknamed “Hobbit.” Hobbit stands only about 3 ½ feet tall and is considered as much an example of a missing link ancestor / early human as any example we have ever had to date.  She was discovered in Indonesia a short while ago but it is her geology and not biology that is so interesting. When archeologists unearth bones like this the earth around the bones are used to determine the relative age of the creature, and Hobbit is only about 18,000 years old. Now, Houston, we have a problem.  Some scientists might have given her the benefit of the doubt that such aggressive generic mutation could occur over 3 million years, right?  I mean, people change, right? But 40 encyclopedias of genetic change over only 18,000 years? This has many paleontologists scratching their heads and heading back to their timelines. I mean, she makes all of our social and scientific progress during this current age of humanity seem like a bunch of lazy underachievers as best, if she was able to mutate as fast as she would have needed to.

Whether you question any of the timelines involved here, or the DNA studies, or the human v. orangutan comparative studies, or are believing in creation or evolution, the one thing we now know, is that our understanding of the human race could nearly (but not quite) fill the brain of a dirty little vampire monkey right about now (OK, before you go shoping for a pet vampire monkey, they don't exist.  This is a fake picture, but I thought it fit it well here.)

It seems the old saying is all the more true: the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know.