Scientists Map DNA of Rhesus Monkeys 104
KingKong writes "Scientists have unraveled the DNA of another of our primate relatives, this time a monkey named the rhesus macaque — and the work has far more immediate impact than just to study evolution. These fuzzy animals are key to testing the safety of many medicines, and understanding such diseases as AIDS, and the new research will help scientists finally be sure when they're a good stand-in for humans. 'Having a third primate will allow scientists to compare the three genomes, with an added emphasis on singling out the genes possessed by humans alone. The end goal is to reconstruct the history of every single one of the approximately 20,000 genes, to determine when they first appeared in history, and in what species. All of this requires an extraordinary amount of information.'"
No, it won't. (Score:3, Insightful)
No scientific effort will ever differentiate the basic category of "human", much less tell us "what it means". From the perspective of DNA, we're simply a biological continuum with animals, and no further objective conclusions will be forthcoming on this question.
The basic ability to formulate this necessary distinction is based purely in metaphysics.
Freaky monkeys (Score:4, Insightful)
This could become rather weird.