What If You're Human and Still Can't Run a Mile?

A cDNA array-based comparative genomic hybridization study out of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and Stanford found that, among 10 primate species that spanned a 60-million-year period of evolutionary time, almost one-third of all human genes showed a predicted change in copy number in one or more of these species. The genes identified with these changes are likely to be important to lineage-specific traits, say scientists in the Genome Research paper, such as physiological adaptations that permit humans to run long distances. (Well, some humans, anyway.)