The arrogance of sciences boasts not its contribution in alleviating suffering but its ability to be corrected given the evidence and its acceptance to the notion: absolute knowledge cannot be attained in our lifetime. That there is so much to learn and wonders to be discovered.
Genetic code once written off as meaningless is today show to have played a potential role in the evolution of the human ability to hold tools and walk upright.
The study is the latest in a long line of evidence to show that the genetics textbooks will have to be rewritten.
Today, in the journal Science, Dr James Noonan of Yale University and colleagues report that one of these supposed non coding "junk" regions may have played a starring role in the evolutionary changes in human limbs that enabled us to manipulate tools and to walk upright.
The comparison of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genetic codes provided evidence that changes in junk areas of the genome helped to separate us from our ape ancestors, notably by "humanising" our hands and feet.
Working with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, the Genome Institute of Singapore, and the Medical Research Council's Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, Dr Noonan searched vast regions of the human genome for DNA sequences whose function may have changed during the evolution of humans from our ape-like ancestors.
The most rapidly evolving sequence they identified, termed HACNS1, is highly conserved among vertebrate species - that is, it hardly varies - but has accumulated variations in 16 letters since the divergence of humans and chimpanzees from a common ancestor six million years ago.
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