WE HAVE been humbled as never before this week. While we congratulate
ourselves on the momentous achievement of sequencing the human genome, the
genome itself is telling us we are not so special after all.
It turns out we have only five times as many genes as a bacterium, a third
more than a worm and about twice as many as a fly. “The genomic view of our
place in nature will be both a source of humility and a blow to the idea of
human uniqueness,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in…
