Common Ancestry Human & Chimpanzee? Not so fast!
The landmark 2005 study by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, "Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome", provided insights into the evolutionary relationship between humans and chimpanzees. The study concluded that the patterns of evolution in human and chimpanzee protein-coding genes are dominated by the fixation of neutral and slightly deleterious alleles . However, the potential impact of non-neutral synonymous substitutions raises questions about this conclusion. Understanding the Study's Conclusion The study focused on analyzing the differences between the human and chimpanzee genomes to understand the evolutionary forces that shaped them. They found that most changes in protein-coding genes were either neutral (having no effect on the organism's fitness) or slightly deleterious (having a small negative effect). This suggests that the driving force behind the divergence of humans and chimpanzees