I dont know if I'm just tripping out but I have the most life-changing question. Out of my immediate family, my father, mother, sister and I all have similar features, even though my parents are not related at all. We all have similar facial/body figures:big noses, big forheads, and small ears. And every cousin I have looks very similar to their siblings. Is this just a genetics or a coincidence or does this mean my family are very closely related to monkeys :S? Like are there people who are more closely related and are decendents of monkeys? Is there such thing or am i just tripping out ? =SImportant life changing question, need reliable information/facts/opinions?That phenomenon, which is not a rare thing, is called anthropomorphism, by adaptative mechanisms, in non genetic related families, all the members of the group, if living together during a liferime (and children since early childhood after birth), will %26quot;adapt%26quot; morphologically themselves, to the morphlogy of non biological parents or siblings.}
A lot of debate has arose from this issue in the past 2 years, because the mechanism od the physical (sometimes extreme and uncanny) resemblance, is still put to the test, and some of the mechanisms that explain this undeniable phenomenon, are not still very clear.
The only thing that can be said for sure, is that this is a REAL phenomenon, (perhaps an adaptative mechanism of the human race in adverse conditions), that can explain the whole issue.
The curious example in middle east, and Latin America, is that, the color of the skin of child adopted from bith, DO CHANGE, when later compared with true biological siblings, tending to resemble more or less that one of the adopting parents....... every solution brings new problems and questions...By the way (sorry to dissapoint You), this phenomenon has nothing to do, with man being closely related to monkeys, or any relation with simian evolution, as far as I know....Important life changing question, need reliable information/facts/opinions?You are no closer to monkeys than anybody else. There probably just isn't much variation in the phenotypes of your parents.Important life changing question, need reliable information/facts/opinions?You are just tripping out!Important life changing question, need reliable information/facts/opinions?You can not be any closer to monkeys than anyone else. In his book %26quot;The Ancestor's Tale%26quot; Dawkins postulated how close ancestors have to be to be able to mate and have fertile offspring, I think he suggested about 200,000 years. Our common ancestor with the monkey lived about 15 million years ago, and with apes about 7 million years ago. Our chromosomes have been drifting apart for that many years, so the chances of you being closely related are impossible. There would have to have been serious inbreeding to maintain those chromosomes as monkey-like enough to retain the looks, while still taking on the evolutionary advances in intelligence etc.
So, in short, it is coincidence. If your parents come from the same area of the world originally, perhaps they have a common descendant a few generations ago, not enough to qualify as consanguinity, but with some features carried through. Do a family tree to find out, if you can.
And find a partner who lives in a different part of the country, just to be sure.Important life changing question, need reliable information/facts/opinions?Your family is no more closely related to apes, than mine. Individual physical characteristics result from genetic recombination,which happens during meiosis, a special type of cell division that occurs during formation of sperm and egg cells and give them the correct number of chromosomes. Each cell contributes one half of their chromosomes which result in the total number in the nucleus of the zygote of 46. Twenty three from each parent.
Assortment takes place for each of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes. So any single human egg receives one of two possiblee chromosomes 23 times and the total number of different possibl chromosome combinations is over 8 million. (2 raised to the 23rd power) And that's just for the eggs. The same random assortment goes on as each sperm cell is made. Thus, when a sperm fertilizes an egg, the resulting zygote contains a combinations of genes arranged in an order that has never occurred before, and will never occur again.
