Comedy Central just ran the Dwight Yoakam episode of Jon Stewart again. The first time I saw it, I was a little annoyed and quite amused. The second time I saw it I was a little amused and very much annoyed. I figured I'd go ahead and make a post on it! Dwight Yoakam rambles through a statement that goes something like, "Advances in DNA show that the apes are not closer...we are like a chromosome removed from dogs...they are the closest mammal to man". He claimed to have gotten this information from a NY Times article! First of all, humans can't be, "like a chromosome removed from dogs" because we do not have the same number of chromosomes(or one more/less)! Also, the most likely reference for Yoakam that I found about the genomes of dogs and humans is at
www.genome.gov/12511476. The article is, "Dog Genome Assembled". If this is the article Dwight Yoakam is referring to, he has sadly misunderstood the findings. The article states that, "The dog genome is similar in size to the genomes of humans and other mammals...". That hardly qualifies as support of Yoakam's claim that dogs "are the closest mammal to man". Did anyone else get riled about that episode? Has anyone else found any articles that Yoakam might have read to give him these ideas? Does anyone have any theories on why Yoakam would choose to spew such gibberish on TV?
*editied to fix link(I think)
**if it isn't fixed this time I request that Nick or Chris please edit it to fix it!
Edited by: tarav at: 7/7/05 11:36 am
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