I've long understood that humans and chimpanzees are surprisingly similar in their genetic makeup. OK. What are the implications of this? For example, one can find physical similarities between a person and, say, a tree, just in terms of sheer matter. Because, ultimately, all material forms (rocks, trees, humans, etc.) come from the same raw stuff. Further, if we are so genetically like chimps why are so very different? Jeremy Taylor's coming book Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human addresses this, and is reviewed in The Spiked Review of Books.
From the review: "Taylor sets out to argue that it is ‘as wrong as it is misguided’ to ‘exaggerate the narrowness of the gap between chimpanzees and ourselves’: ‘It plays into the hands of our natural propensity to anthropomorphise our pets and other animals, and even our inanimate possessions, and it has allowed us to distort what the science is trying to tell us.’ His aim is ‘to set the record straight and restore chimpanzees to arm’s length’."
Taylor writes: "Though you may argue that all the differences between us and chimpanzees, from variation among neurotransmitter regulators to spindle cell populations and a host of genes to do with the nervous system, metabolism, and immunity, are a matter of degree – quantitative rather than qualitative differences – I think that these quantitative differences are of such magnitude that their combined effect is to produce a cognitive creature that is unique and whose mind is in a league of its own."
Thus, the genetic uniqueness of humans to chimps, which most of Taylor's book is about. This is certain to upset some whose worldview rejects any talk of such things. But such can be the results of science which, when done purely, is ignorant of politics.
