We're Really Chimps???

Well I would suggest that the video was perhaps mistaken. Slime molds may well have proteins with a relatively conserved hemoglobin globin domain, as in the protein flavohemoglobin, but that is by no means the same as having a protein 98% similar to the human hemoglobin protein. Having said that the closest human homolog I could see to the flavohemoglobin globin fold was neuroglobin and that was only 23% identical. *ABE* Actually I found a more similar one which is 25.68% similar to human flavohemoprotein. There is a detailed examination of globin lineages throughout the kingdoms of life in a paper published last year (Vinogradov, et al., 2005)AS to the 93% relationship to your parents, I think you would have to use a very odd metric to get this result, such as considering any gene with even 1 nucleotide of difference to be a completely different gene. For example if you had a genome of 10 coding genes all 5 kb in length then using such a metric a single nucleotide substitution would drop your identity with the original genome to 90% even though in nucleotide terms the change in identity would only be 0.00002%. I can't see any other way to get such a cockeyed figure, which doesn't mean that there isn't one of course.One other point is that it doesn't really matter if there are slime mold proteins which are similar to those in humans, in fact common descent would suggest that you are very likely to find similar genes throughout all the kingdoms of life, the important thing is the patterns within those genes. The human and chimp hemoglobins are much more similar than those of humans and slime molds. Any organism which requires aerobic respiration to live is going to need some sort of oxygen binding proteins and hemoglobin domains are a good way of doing it, so we might expect to see such proteins throughout the anaerobic organisms. Now if you showed that slime mold hemoglobin was more similar to human hemoglobin than a chimp's you might have something which would be problematic for evolutionary theory.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 10-Apr-2006 09:47 AM

They may well not have hemoglobins but they still have oxygen binding proteins. Unless that is you are proposing that they lack Cytochrome C? In which case a reference would be pretty useful.TTFN,WK