Letter: Never grow old

From Stephen Wilson

So what makes humans different from our nearest relatives is that we have lost some regulatory DNA (12 March, p 3 and p 6) which controls how genes are expressed. This may help revive a century-old theory.

Louis Bolk, and later Gavin De Beer, Desmond Morris and Stephen Jay Gould, observed that human beings have more in common with infant chimpanzees than with their adult parents. We have managed to work out the function of two of the 510 chunks of DNA that we have lost and they seem to allow juvenile development (brain growth in this case) to continue longer than it was “meant” to. If the other 508 have similar functions it looks as though the neoteny theory has fared very well indeed.

Ape ancestors growing like an infant for much longer by losing regulatory DNA makes sense as a theory for the origin of humanity.

Perhaps we will have to change the name of our species to Peter Pan troglodytes– the chimp that never grew up.

London, UK