Chimp Genetics
In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closest friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided, “I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.” Chimp genetics, by extension of Darwin’s theory, were expected to be similar to humans. Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography –
“My Descent of Man was published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.”
The chimp, since the nineteenth century, has been the poster-child missing link to humans. In twenty-first-century terms, the mammalian Y chromosomes were expected to be similar, as speculated by Darwin. However, new evidence demonstrates Darwin’s speculation to be wrong—the chimp Y chromosome differs radically from humans.