And then the muskrat sneezed purple goo

[fayanora]

Potpourri

Funny song: "Reluctant Pirates" by Strong Men Stoop.

Stories that would have been different if they'd had cell phones. "But soft! What SMS through yonder RAZR breaks?"

Funny: Interview with a Dalek!

A comic about a character who knows he's a character in a comic.

52 ways to piss off Naraku. (Explanation, though some of the details

Comments

[christinaathena]

Think humans have 46 chromosomes and chimps have 48? We do. That article doesn't say anything different, just that chromosome 2 was formed from the fusion of two ape chromosomes, which is OLD NEWS. They've known that human chromosome 2 was formed from a fusion of Chimpanzee 2q and 2p (which that article strangely calls 12 and 13 - every other source I've seen uses 2p and 2q) since the middle of the 20th century! What's new is just that they've found the specific bases that show what's been known all along.

There are a lot of conditions that give rise to XY females. The unusual thing in that case is that she has all of the internal equipment. Normally, XY females lack at least ovaries, and more commonly also the uterus.

[kengr]

There are a lot of conditions that give rise to XY females. The unusual thing in that case is that she has all of the internal equipment. Normally, XY females lack at least ovaries, and more commonly also the uterus.

Yeah, those are usually AIS or PAIS. This is something different. And very interesting.

[christinaathena]

There's also Swyer Syndrome where the SRY gene is broken. That actually results in the development of a uterus, but there are no gonads, the fetal gonad does not become testes or ovaries, but instead and indistinct smear. (It also results in no natural puberty, due to the lack of any gonads)

[underlankers]

And to think that one chromosome that merged from two is all that separates me from Bonzo.

I think Bonzo would be insulted by that. No doubt he's organizing with General Ursus now that Charleton Heston is dead....

[christinaathena]

Heh. Well, there's more than the one fused chromosome. Still, there is a remarkably little amount of difference. Most of the differences are actually in regulatory elements, bits of DNA that, simplifying somewhat, control when and where genes are active, and for how long (especially important in developmental genes).

In terms of sheer genetic difference, horses and donkeys are more different than humans and chimps. Which is why some biologists have proposed extending Homo out to include chimpanzees and possibly even gorillas, which would give our genus 3 or 5 living species (there are two species each of chimp and gorilla). So, in addition to H. sapiens, we'd have H. troglodytes, H. paniscus, H. gorilla and H. berengei. That would also require renaming all the extinct hominines, like Australopithecus and so forth, since they'd have to be merged into Homo as well.

[underlankers]

Well...we still keep mice and rats as separate species, so I hardly see a need to make Pan, Australopithecus and Paranthropus meaningless genera.

Although, long before Darwin proposed his theory, the first taxonomist to deal with Chimps (Carolus Linnaeus himself) made the Chimpanzee Homo sylvestris. If Pan were to become Homo, that would be the proper appellation for the Common Chimp and the Bonobo.

I've often been fond of referring to humans as deformed chimp feti, because an adult human is like a chimp fetus grown to a large height and weight. I love evolutionary biology, and especially paleoanthropology with a passion.

[christinaathena]

Mice and rats are actually distributed among a large number of genera in the Muridae family. They consist of hundreds of species in a group that goes back much further than the human-chimp-gorilla grouping (whose last common ancestor was somewhere around 7 million years ago)

The troglodytes species would remain for the common chimp and paniscus for the Bonobo. Specific names don't generally change when a species is recategorized into a different genus.

Also, I've read that Linnaeus categorized chimps as Homo troglodytes, using the same specific name that's used now.