IT AIN’T what you got, it’s the way that you use it. Humans and other primates may be genetically quite similar, but differences in the activity of individual genes lead to clear differences between the species.
That was the theory, but until now little has been known about how gene activity differs in different primates. To find out, Yoav Gilad, a human geneticist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues measured gene activity in equivalent genes from humans, chimps, orang-utans and rhesus macaques. They found that between any pair of species gene activity differed in 12 to 19 per…
