What it means to be 98% chimanzee: apes, people, and their genes
19 March 2004
Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, USA
Classification is a quintessentially human activity, by which we impart meaning through the arrangement of natural objects. Our own place in the natural order, established by science, is predicated on our relationship to the apes, our closest living relatives. Consequently the apes are invested with symbolic meaning that transcends their existence as natural species. For example, the web site makes a satirical political point of the ostensible resemblance between the American president and a chimpanzee. The > 98% DNA similarity of humans and chimpanzees is a well-known fact of modern genetics, and is invoked in diverse ways by different scholars – commonly in contrast to the physical dissimilarity of the species. But what sounds like an overwhelming genetic near-identity between human and ape is actually a product of the conjunction of two cultural facts: our familiarity with the ape body, the subject of scientific study for over 300 years; and the exotic nature of DNA comparisons, which have been going on for only 25 years.
Reference
What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes
Jonathan Marks
University of California Press, 2002