CONTRARY to what you might think, large differences in DNA, not small ones, separate apes and monkeys from both humans and each other.
Scientists believed that differences between primates were mainly the result of variations in individual DNA letters. But a detailed comparison of human chromosome 21 with corresponding regions of genetic material in chimpanzees, orang-utans, rhesus macaques and woolly monkeys shows the differences affect great chunks of DNA.
“There are large deletions and insertions sprinkled throughout the chromosome,” says Kelly Frazer of Perlegen Sciences, the company in Mountain View, California, whose analysis appears in Genome Research (vol 13, p 341). The finding that chunks, rather…
