By Jonathan Marks
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Additional info for What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes
Sample text
All such comparisons invariably yield the result that humans and chimpanzees (and gorillas) are extraordinarily similar. But that was known to Linnaeus without the aid of molecular genetics. So what’s new? Just the number. g e n e t i ca l a n d a n a tom i cal contrasts If you compare a human and a chimpanzee, it is easy to see that structurally they are remarkably similar. Every bone of the chimpanzee body corresponds almost perfectly to a bone in a human body— but differs ever so slightly and diagnostically, in ways generally related to the human habit of walking upright.
So the paradox of our great genetic resemblance and notable physical dissimilarity seems less paradoxical. There is a real paradox, however, that bears considering. We know, on the one hand, that genetic changes are at the root of the visible differences between humans and apes. Franz Kafka’s short story “Report to an Academy” gives the reflections of an ape who has become human by virtue of living in Europe and ponders the life he now leads and the one he has left behind. Kafka was using the ape-intohuman as a metaphor for the assimilated European Jews in a Christian world, in between the Dreyfus Affair and the Holocaust.
What appeared at first to be a revelation about our animal nature is instead a revelation about how we box up nature to make sense of it. Making sense of the world through classification is a fundamentally human act, and each human group does it in its own way, and thus imposes structure upon the world for itself. Modern science classifies animals by two criteria, descent and divergence. This creates confusions such as the occasional paraphyletic category, in which divergence takes precedence over proximity of descent.