The discussion of evolution is always taken with levity but do you know that people like Charles Darwin spent 5 years circling the world so as to discover what was later called the Origin of Species. Another person, Alfred Russel Wallace traveled the entire South Asia in the space of 8 years, so as to get a glimpse of evolution first hand. So when you see information about evolution from the comfort of your home, do not regard it as something of less importance because people sacrificed a lot for us to understand what we do today.
"How does this concern me as an individual?" I just guessed you asked that question but the answer is in you and not even in front or behind because there are a lot of characteristics that our ancestors possessed before but we do not possess them anymore but still have remains or clues of them in us.
A good one is the Tail bone which used to be a tail before, I have a cousin who is able to move his ears and it was always fascinating for us as children so, if you can move your ear just like my cousin, then you share certain muscles with other mammals but mammals aren't the only animals we share evolutionary characters with. The pink Bit in the corner of our eyes are leftovers of the third eyes in birds, lizards, and even fishes. So we can say that we are closely related than we think we are.
Another evolutionary character that we didn't lose but we don't have the required feature to display it properly is Goosebumps which is very visible in animals that didn't lose their hairs thereby allowing them to be able to raise their hair when they encounter danger or to help prevent the loss of heat. While scientist have not been able to specifically say why and how hiccups happen, they have been able to trace its origin back to the brains of tadpoles and fishes and it is a brain signal that the animals use to remove water through their gills.
Another genetically identical character that we share with some other organisms is Chromosomes. When we put together the chromosomes of chimpanzee and that of humans, it is extremely identical except for one, the chromosome 2 with the chimpanzee having 2A and 2B. Also, our karyotype has 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs while that of chimpanzee is 48 chromosomes in 24 pairs.
According to evolution, ours ancestors possessed the 2A and 2B chromosomes but in the process of evolution, the chromosomes joined together to become a one long chromosome 2. This chromosome is similar to that of Gorillas and Orangutans but we had a fusion of chromosomes and with that fusion comes two centromeres (centers) where two telomeres (the end of the chromosomes) stuck together in the middle to form a single chromosome.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org
Now that we are done with chromosomes and our closest relatives, lets go a little farther with an animal with two legs, a chicken. One thing we have in common with chickens is egg. We all come from an egg and in a chicken's egg, the embryo produces a yolk sac which surrounds the yolk that the embryo feeds on until it becomes a bird. While humans also come from egg, we do not produce a yolk instead we get the necessary nutrients and immune protection from our mother. Although we do not have a yolk, we create an empty yolk sac which disappears halfway through pregnancy.
This implies that we share evolutionary link on egg with reptiles and birds and this can be proven because the Vitelloenin protein found in the yolk of eggs of birds and reptiles, and in 2008, fragments of these gene was found in human's Genome. It is no doubt that we have evolved over the years and if we are to trace human ancestory, we will be surprised at the results we would get even when we expect to get those results.
Read More
- https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-020-06962-8
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC187548/
- https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-022-08828-7
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267819/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10239796/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jez.b.21239
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10815947/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6736625/
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