Sex Determination in Humans and other Animals

In class today we reviewed the fruit fly lab from last week and discussed how it is possible that humans share 60% of the same DNA as fruit flies. Because all living things evolved from an original common ancestor, the genetics relationship between organisms can be described by how similar or different they are from each other. We talked about how humans are more closely related to dogs than to fruit flies but that we are even more closely related to chimpanzees than any other organism. In fact we share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relative.

Additionally we discussed how the biological sex of an organism is determined and watched the video to the left which explained that sex determination is different among other groups of animals.