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Wallenda

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Everything posted by Wallenda

  1. He was in the first play I ever saw, a musical called Purlie, this a few years before he became famous on tv as George Jefferson -- in that play he was alongside Cleavon Little who later played the sheriff in Blazing Saddles (he passed in 1992 at just 54 -- incidentally, that part was originally supposed to go to Richard Pryor but he was rejected by the studio, he was a co-writer of the script). I was just a kid when I saw it, but remember Helmsley was the one who got all the laughs.
  2. http://williamcalvin.com/BrainForAllSeasons/img/gorilla-chimp-human.jpg This is a pretty typical chart. You will find others out there that place humans on the opposite side, though if chimp DNA differs from that of gorillas more than humans' does, it seems as if humans are correctly placed in this chart here. Maybe you should talk with your friend and find out what exactly he thinks is total BS. I first read this in Jared Diamond's "Third Chimpanzee"--he's a pretty mainstream scientist, so I'd be surprised if this is a far-flung theory of his.
  3. Right -- chimps and humans are very close in DNA to each other, and closer to each other than either is to gorillas. But chimps' DNA is further from gorillas' DNA than humans' is. He might disagree with that point, but if he does, the part you mentioned doesn't contradict it.
  4. Technically, no. Chimp DNA differs from gorilla DNA more than human DNA differs from gorilla DNA. It means the common ancestor of humans and gorillas came before that of chimps and gorillas, in other words humans branched off before chimps did. And zoologically speaking, we are just one more species of ape. So it would probably be more true to say that chimps got their traits from us. But then again the 'us' we're talking about is a long extinct missing link who you definitely would not want to wake up next to in the morning.
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