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Friday Fluff - July 15th, 2011

Explore mutation rate shifts and their implications for the divergence between chimpanzees and humans. Discover key insights here.

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1) Post from the past:Race: the current consensus. 2) Weird search query of the week: "i, for one, welcome our aquatic overlords reddit." 3) Comment of the week, in response to "What one (or more) genomes can tell us":

An important constraint on mutation rate shifts is that chimpanzees and humans are almost exactly equally diverged from Gorilla (and Orang-Utan). As the mutation rate varies with generation time, this suggests that the mean generation time of humans and chimps since the split can’t be hugely different, and strongly argues against major mutation rate changes in our ancestors of the last few million years.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

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