Human evolution tied to a small fraction of the genome
Traits may depend more on how genes are used than on DNA’s directions
Only about 7.5 percent of the human genetic instruction book shaped the evolution of human traits, a new study suggests. And it’s often not genes, but the how-to instructions for using those genes that are most important, researchers report January 19 in Nature Genetics.
Those findings emerged from a new method of analyzing how natural selection has tinkered with the genome since humans split from chimpanzees.
“Remarkably we use nearly the same building blocks as chimpanzees, but we end up with very different results,” says Brad Gulko, a computer scientist at Cornell University.