Frustrated by the shortcomings of traditional methods for deciphering bird relationships, Sibley and Jon Ahlquist turned in 1973 to the DNA clock, in the most massive application to date of the methods of molecular biology to taxonomy. Not until 1980 were Sibley and Ahlquist ready to begin publishing their results, which eventually came to encompass applying the DNA clock to about 1,700 bird species—nearly one-fifth of all living birds.
While Sibley's and Ahlquist's achievement was a monumental one, it initially caused much controversy because so few other scientists possessed the blend of expertise required to understand it. Here are typical reactions I heard from my scientist friends:
I'm sick of hearing about that stuff. I no longer pay attention to anything those guys write, (an anatomist).
'Their methods are okay, but why would anyone want to do something so boring as all that bird taxonomy? (a molecular biologist).
'Interesting, but their conclusions need a lot of testing by other methods before we can believe them, (an evolutionary biologist).
'Their results are The Revealed Truth, and you better believe it, (a geneticist).
My own assessment is that the last view will prove to be the most nearly correct one. The principles on which the DNA clock rests are unassailable; the methods used by Sibley and
Ahlquist are state-of-the-art; and the internal consistency of their genetic-distance measurements from over 18,000 hybrid pairs of bird DNA testifies to the validity of their results.
Just as Darwin had the good sense to marshal his evidence for variation in barnacles before discussing the explosive subject of human variation, Sibley and Ahlquist similarly stuck to birds for most of the first decade of their work with the DNA clock. Not until 1984 did they publish their first conclusions from applying the same DNA methods to human origins, and they refined their conclusions in later papers. Their study was based on DNA from humans and from all of our closest relatives: the common chimpanzee, pygmy chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, two species of gibbons, and seven species of Old World monkeys. The figure on this page summarizes the results.
As any anatomist would have predicted, the biggest genetic difference, expressed in a big DNA melting point lowering, is between monkey DNA and the DNA of humans or of any ape. This simply puts a number on what everybody has agreed ever since apes first became known to science: that humans and apes are more closely related to each other than either are to monkeys. The actual statistic is that monkeys share ninety-three per cent of their DNA structure with humans and apes, and differ in seven per cent.
Equally unsurprising is the next biggest difference, one of five per cent between gibbon DNA and the DNA of other apes or humans. This too confirms the accepted view that gibbons are the most distinct apes, and that our affinities are instead with gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Among those latter three groups of apes, most recent anatomists have considered the orangutan as somewhat separate, and that conclusion too fits the DNA evidence: a difference of 3.6 % between orangutan DNA and that of humans, gorillas, or chimpanzees. Geography confirms that the latter three species parted from gibbons and orangutans quite some time ago: living and fossil gibbons and orangutans are confined to Southeast Asia, while living gorillas and chimpanzees plus early fossil humans are confined to Africa.
At the opposite extreme but equally unsurprising, the most similar DNAs are those of common chimpanzees and pygmy chimpanzees, which are 99.3 % identical and differ by1 only 0.7 %. So similar are these two chimp species in appearance that it was not until 1929 that anatomists even bothered to give them separate names. Chimps living on the equator in central Zaire rate the name 'pygmy chimps' because they are on average slightly smaller (and have more slender builds and longer legs) than the widespread 'common chimps' ranging across Africa just north of the equator. However, with the increased knowledge of chimp behaviour acquired in recent years, it has become clear that the modest anatomical differences between pygmy and common chimps mask considerable differences in reproductive biology. Unlike common chimps but like ourselves, pygmy chimps assume a wide variety of positions for copulation, including face-to-face; copulation can be initiated by either sex, not just by the male; females are sexually receptive for much of the month, not just for a briefer period in mid-month; and there are strong bonds among females or between males and females, not just among males. Evidently, those few genes (0.7 %) that differ between pygmy and common chimps have big consequences for sexual physiology and roles. That same theme—a small percentage of gene differences having great consequences—will recur later in this and the next chapter in regard to the gene differences between humans and chimps.
In all the cases that I have discussed so far, anatomical evidence of relationships was already convincing, and the DNA-based conclusions confirmed what the anatomists had already concluded. But DNA was also able to resolve the problem at which anatomy had failed—the relationships between humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. As the figure on page 17 shows, humans differ from both common chimps and pygmy chimps in about 1.6 % of their (our) DNA, and share 98.4 %. Gorillas differ somewhat more, by about 2.3 %, from us and from both of the chimps.
Let us pause to let some of the implications of these momentous numbers sink in.
The gorilla must have branched off from our family tree slightly before we separated from the common and pygmy chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, not the gorilla, are our closest relatives. Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but the human. Traditional taxonomy has reinforced our anthropocentric tendencies by claiming to see a fundamental dichotomy between mighty man, standing alone on high, and the lowly apes all together in the abyss of bestiality. Now future taxonomists may see things from the chimpanzees' perspective: a weak dichotomy between slightly higher apes (the three chimpanzees, including the 'human chimpanzee') and slightly lower apes (gorilla, orangutan, gibbons). The traditional distinction between 'apes' (defined as chimps, gorillas, etc.) and humans misrepresents the facts. The genetic distance (1.6 %) separating us from pygmy or common chimps is barely double that separating pygmy from common chimps (0.7 %). It is less than that between two species of gibbons (2.2 %), or between such closely related North American bird species as red-eyed vireos and white-eyed vireos (2.9 %), or between such closely related and hard-to-distinguish European bird species as willow warblers and chiffchaffs (2.6 %). The remaining 98.4 % of our genes are just normal chimp genes. For example, our principal haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein that gives blood its red colour, is identical in all 287 units with chimp haemoglobin. In this respect as in most others, we are just a third species of chimpanzee, and what is good enough for common and pygmy chimps is good enough for us. Our important visible distinctions from the other chimps—our upright posture, large brains, ability to speak, sparse body hair, and peculiar sexual lives (of which I will say more in Chapter Three)—must be concentrated in a mere 1.6 % of our genes.
If genetic distances between species accumulated at a uniform rate with time, they would function as a smoothly ticking clock. All that would be required to convert genetic distance into absolute time since the last common ancestor would be a calibration, furnished by a pair of species for which we know both the genetic distance and the time of divergence as dated independently by fossils. In fact, two independent calibrations are available for higher primates. On the one hand, monkeys diverged from apes between twenty-five and thirty million years ago according to fossil evidence, and now differ in about 7.3 % of their DNA. On the other hand, orangutans diverged from chimps and gorillas between twelve and sixteen million years ago and now differ in about 3.6 % of their DNA. Comparing these two examples, a doubling of evolutionary time, as one \ goes from twelve or sixteen to twenty-five or thirty million years, leads to a doubling of genetic distance (3.6 to 7.3 % of DNA). Thus, the DNA clock has ticked relatively steadily among higher primates.