45
Junk DNA does have a use. It is the portion employed in DNA fingerprinting. Its practicality for this purpose was discovered accidentally by Alec Jeffreys, a scientist at the University of Leicester in England. In 1986 Jeffreys was studying DNA sequences for genetic markers associated with heritable diseases when he was approached by the police and asked if he could help connect a suspect to two murders. He realized his technique ought to work perfectly for solving criminal cases—and so it proved. A young baker with the improbable name of Colin Pitchfork was sentenced to two life terms in prison for the murders.
46
Though Dutch, Dubois was from Eijsden, a town bordering the French-speaking part of Belgium.
47
Humans are put in the family Hominidae. Its members, traditionally called hominids, include any creatures (including extinct ones) that are more closely related to us than to any surviving chimpanzees. The apes, meanwhile, are lumped together in a family called Pongidae. Many authorities believe that chimps, gorillas, and orangutans should also be included in this family, with humans and chimps in a subfamily called Homininae. The upshot is that the creatures traditionally called hominids become, under this arrangement, hominins. (Leakey and others insist on that designation.) Hominoidea is the name of the ape superfamily, which includes us.
48
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything—or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations. It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked. As Gould notes, A. africanus had a brain of only 450cc, smaller than that of a gorilla. But a typical africanus male weighed less than a hundred pounds, and a female much less still, whereas gorillas can easily top out at 600 pounds. (Ever Since Darwin 181–3)
49
One possibility is that Neandertals and Cro-Magnons had different numbers of chromosomes, a complication that commonly arises when species that are close but not quite identical conjoin. In the equine world, for example, horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys 62. Mate the two and you get an offspring with a reproductively useless number of chromosomes, 63. You have, in short, a sterile mule.
