clipped from www.sciencedaily.com

On Malaria Struggle, Baboons And Humans Have Similar Stories To Tell

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — Evolutionarily speaking, baboons may be our more distant cousins among primates. But when it comes to our experiences with malaria over the course of time, it seems the stories of our two species have followed very similar plots.

“It’s a nice example of how – in the vastness of the genome – the same gene was modified in the same way in two different species to produce the same kind of resistance,” says Greg Wray, director of the IGSP’s Center for Evolutionary Genomics. “That’s a pretty remarkable thing when you think of all the different ways malaria resistance might have evolved.”

clipped from www.newsroom.ucla.edu

Close social ties make baboons better mothers, study finds

“If you’re a baboon, the strength of your mother’s relationship with other females is the best predictor of whether you’ll live to have children yourself,” said Joan Silk, the study’s lead author and a UCLA professor of anthropology. “The study adds to mounting evidence of the biological benefits of close relationships among females.”

The findings are significant because “survivorship to reproduction is the gold standard in evolutionary biology,” said co-author Dorothy Cheney, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Females who raise offspring to a reproductive age are more likely see their genes pass along, so these findings demonstrate an evolutionary advantage to strong relationships with other females. In evolutionary terms, social moms are the fittest moms — at least when it comes to baboons.”