Chimps More Evolved Than Humans

Google that phrase, and this is what you come up with. Tons of articles that entitled "Chimps More Evolved Than Humans." It's one of those headlines designed to shock people by skewing scientific fact towards the dramatic. Technically it's true, but technically it's going to confuse a lot of people who don't take the time to read past the headline.

The evolution in question is that of the DNA of chimpanzees and humans. Since humans and chimps split from their common ancestor 6 million years ago, more genes have evolved in chimps than in humans. Thus, chimps are "more evolved" than humans from their common ancestor. Fascinating to a certain degree, but not half as fascinating as what I learned in Newsweek, which is that all of humanity stems from an estimated 4,000 individuals who migrated out of Africa 66,000 years ago. (OK, it's a really long article, but trust me; it's in there somewhere, and they figured this out using...DNA!)

But perhaps most fascinating of all is Yahoo!'s coverage of the chimp DNA finding, which includes this sentence:

"The results, detailed online this week in the Proceedings of the large brains, cognitive abilities and bi-pedalism."

What is that?! I can't even figure out what they were trying to say. The link is in the original and no, I'm not making it up that the first time I clicked on "large brains" I was taken to an error page. It's apparently been fixed. Stellar scientific reporting there, Yahoo.