Question: Do you also research how some animals evolved?

Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 14 Jun 2010:

In my current job I don’t really but when I was studying to get my zoology degree I had to learn about it. I personally find it fascinating and I think that evolution is one of the most important scientific theories ever in terms of explaining how life formed and why it is the way it is today.

I do sometimes have to consider it when I am doing work on looking at how to replace primate experiments. This is because the most common reason why monkeys and apes are used in experiments is because they are our closest evolutionary relatives, so the argument goes that they will be the most similar animal to us and so are more likely to react like we would to drugs etc.

But this isn’t necessarily the case. For example although Chimpanzees have DNA that is 98% the same as humans the small 2% difference accounts for the large differences between them and us, such as how they look and more importantly from my point of view how they respond to infections and illnesses. They do not necessarily fight off infection in the same way that people do and they do not always suffer from the same symptoms.

I wish I had time to look at the reasons for this in more detail to see what factors have caused these differences over the thousands of years since we became two seperate species but it’s not really my job at the moment I just need to understand the differences not so much why they have evolved.