Hi everyone,
I plan on using this blog as a personal outlet, as opposed to the writing I do for The Advanced Apes in The Ratchet, which is specifically focused on big history and evolutionary studies.
Over the past few months I have been trying to improve my abilities as a science writer through my website. However, I have also been sending my writing out to other websites, and I have gotten a lot of help and positive feedback. In September I started writing for The People Project, and just this past month I started writing for the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada (which was a significant personal achievement for me). And one of my articles was published by American Humanist back in October. However, I recently got an opportunity to write for Scientific American Guest Blog, which was my biggest opportunity so far as a science writer. I was very nervous while composing the article but I had a lot of help from my friends, and they helped improve the article and my writing in general. Today it was published and it is a little surreal to see my name on the Scientific American website. Like a lot of people who grew up loving science, Scientific American was one of my favourite publications.
In the future, I hope I can continue to write for them. But for now I’m going to enjoy this moment. You can check out the article –> here!
Cadell
www.theadvancedapes.com
@cadelllast
I enjoyed reading your post at Scientific American; I am personally wondering how much the bonobo is distinctly different from the three chimpanzee species which you cited in your. Are there any genetic mappings of four mentioned?
Well geneticists just recently completed all four great ape genomes:
http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2012/10/16/decoding-our-family
So we really don’t have a complete understanding of what specific genes differ between the great apes. We have also just recently started to understand what genes specifically separate humans from chimps:
http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2012/12/7/building-the-genetic-bridge
Hopefully in the near future we will better understand these specific differences. At the moment we know speciation dates and rates of gene flow and drift, etc. For example, we know that all chimpanzees (west, central, Nigeria-Cameroon, east and bonobos) all shared a common ancestor around 800,000 years ago to 1 million years ago. Bonobos split 800,000 years ago, western chimps split 500,000 years ago (both within any gene flow between subspecies) and then Nigeria-Cameroon, central and eastern chimpanzees split more recently but there has been some gene flow. Although we need to know the relationships between the latter three subspecies in more detail.