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Asked by maryamm07 to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 7 Mar 2014.
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Nick Goldman answered on 7 Mar 2014:
I have, yes. I’ve done lots of studies where we compare parts of genomes from humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, other apes, and lots of other mammals. We can look at where the genomes are the same, and where they are different, and can work out which are more-closely related to which others: for example, humans and chimps are more closely related to each other than either of them is to gorillas.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that chimps are our ancestors. It means that millions of years ago, there was an ape-like creature: some of its descendents changed into chimps, and other ones of its descendents became humans. And some more of its descendents died-out.
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Anna Middleton answered on 7 Mar 2014:
@maryamm07 I haven’t personally done any investigations about evolution, but I follow the principle of evolution and it fascinates me that there are many genes that we share with apes and monkeys – they must be pretty important at doing certain things or they wouldn’t have been conserved.
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Iain Moal answered on 8 Mar 2014:
Yes, at the moment I am doing a project looking at how proteins that interact with each other have evolved over time, and to do that I have to look at the proteins from close relatives, such as chimps, as well as more distant relatives, such as mice, and even very distant relative, like yeast!
As Nick said, however, we should be careful what we mean when we say that we evolved from apes or monkeys. We didn’t evolve from modern apes or monkeys, but we evolved from a common ancestor which might have looked more like a modern ape than we do, but it would have been different in many ways too.
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