Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash. Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called His previous blog can be found. My blog banners were designed by pough - frequent commenter and Photoshop wizard. Bill Clark and Chris Whitehouse. Thanks you all do excellent Photoshop work!
"Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul..." Mark Twain "Ideology is a poor substitute for rational thought..." Afarensis "It isn't faith that makes good science.. it's curiosity" Prof. Jacob Barnhardt. The Day the Earth Stood Still "This man wishes to be accorded the same privilege as a sponge. He wishes to think!" Clarence Darrow. Inherit the Wind "... I become fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason..."Klaatu. The Day the Earth Stood Still "I want you to grab life by its little bunny ears and get in its face..." The Simpsons"This is between me and the vegetable..."Seymour Krelborn. The Little Shop of Horrors"There are bad laws and cruel laws and the people who enforce them are both bad and cruel..."Thea. Isle of the Dead "With the first link the chain is forged. The first speech censored the first thought forbidden the first freedom denied chains us all irrevocably." Jean- Luc Picard. Star Trek: The Next Generation "But the limit of tolerance for these human foibles is obtained when the proponent of a questionable scientific doctrine endeavors to maintain it against all possible odds by misrepresentation misinformation and suppression of contradictory data and by insinuating unfairness in opponents of his views." Franz Weidenreich. Morphology of Solo Man"Man stands alone in the universe a unique product of a long unconcious impersonal material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces but his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny."George Gaylord Simpson. Life of the PastYeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,he's smarter than you he's got a science degree!Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,he's smarter than you he's got a science degree!UnknownWhoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss the abyss also looks into you. Frederich Nietzsche The Declaration of Independence
Here we present a draft genome sequence of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Through comparison with the human genome we have generated a largely complete catalogue of the genetic differences that have accumulated since the human and chimpanzee species diverged from our common ancestor constituting approximately thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes five million insertion/deletion events and various chromosomal rearrangements. We use this catalogue to explore the magnitude and regional variation of mutational forces shaping these two genomes and the strength of positive and negative selection acting on their genes. In particular we find that the patterns of evolution inhuman and chimpanzee protein-coding genes are highly correlated and dominated by the fixation of neutral and slightly deleterious alleles. We also use the chimpanzee genome as an outgroup to investigate human population genetics and identify signatures of selective sweeps in recent human evolution.
The second paper is (not downloadable without access - and if someone could send me this one I would appreciate it) . Here is the abstract:
Copy number variants (CNVs) underlie many aspects of human phenotypic diversity and provide the raw material for gene duplication and gene family expansion. However our understanding of their evolutionary significance remains limited. We performed comparative genomic hybridization on a single human microarray platform to identify CNVs among the genomes of 30 humans and 30 chimpanzees as well as fixed copy number differences between species. We found that human and chimpanzee CNVs occur in orthologous genomic regions far more often than expected by chance and are strongly associated with the presence of highly homologous intrachromosomal segmental duplications. By adapting population genetic analyses for use with copy number data we identified functional categories of genes that have likely evolved under purifying or positive selection for copy number changes. In particular duplications and deletions of genes with inflammatory response and cell proliferation functions may have been fixed by positive selection and involved in the adaptive phenotypic differentiation of humans and chimpanzees.
An interesting evolution related paper (also open access) is in PNAS. Here is the abstract:
A fundamental but unanswered biological question asks how much energy on average. Earth's different life forms spend per unit mass per unit time to remain alive. Here using the largest database to date for 3,006 species that includes most of the range of biological diversityon the planet--from bacteria to elephants and algae to sapling trees--we show that metabolism displays a striking degree of homeostasis across all of life. We demonstrate that despite the enormous biochemical physiological and ecological differences between the surveyed species that vary over 1020-fold in body mass mean metabolic rates of major taxonomic groups displayed at physiological rest converge on a narrow range from 0.3 to 9 W kg1. This 30-fold variation among life's disparate forms represents a remarkably small range compared with the 4,000- to 65,000-fold difference between the mean metabolic rates of the smallest and largest organisms that would be observed if life as a whole conformed to universal quarterpower or third-power allometric scaling laws. The observed broad convergence on a narrow range of basal metabolic rates suggests that organismal designs that fit in this physiological window have been favored by natural selection across all of life's major kingdoms and that this range might therefore be considered as optimal for living matter as a whole.
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Related article:
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2008/11/06/chimp_and_human_genome_compare/
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