What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, people and their genes by Jonathan Marks, University of California Press, 拢19.95/$27.50, ISBN 0520226151
鈥淎 HUMAN is not like an artichoke, in which the prickly leaves of culture can be peeled away, leaving only the exposed tender heart of the 鈥榥atural man鈥�,鈥� writes Jonathan Marks in his grumpy attack on those who see a close alliance between chimps and humans. They are separate, says Marks. Culture is the difference. 鈥淚f the human is like a cake, culture is like the eggs, not like the icing, it is an inseparable part, not a superficial glaze.鈥� That is the mark of human kind and it is, he believes, quite enough to separate us from the other apes.
He takes issue with 鈥渢he molecular factoid鈥� that we share 98 per cent of our genetic material with chimps. As a molecular anthropologist, he can show how wobbly that figure is, and goes on to question what it really means. Why is that particular percentage so special? After all, we share 40 per cent of our genes with fish and 25 per cent with dandelions, yet no one suggests we call them cousins. Forget the 98 per cent: it鈥檚 the 2 per cent that counts. That鈥檚 what makes us human, says Marks.
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Iconoclastic, yet witty and informative, What it Means to be 98% Human is the book that awkward sods everywhere have been waiting for. It is full of inconvenient ideas. Marks covers an amazing amount of ground, including short and intertwined histories of anthropology, classification, race and the nature-nurture debate. He sets all this against a sociopolitical backdrop that, as a firm adherent of the idea of science as a cultural practice, he believes is the most impor-tant factor in shaping scientific thought. Only political infighting and careerism take precedence, he says. The result is a thought-provoking book that gives many of the sacred cows of primatology a good shove. As a lab man, however, Marks doesn鈥檛 know fieldwork well enough to tip them over totally.
He is fond of showing how the tyranny of apparent objectivity means that we prefer our pronouncements to include numbers. It doesn鈥檛 appear to matter if the numbers derive from badly wrought experiments or poorly thought-through analyses. Working at the intersection of anthropology and genetics has jaundiced Marks鈥檚 view of the media. He is scathing about the attempts of scientists to gain fame and career advancement by courting media coverage. Still, he is not above wielding the stiletto of character assassination. He has the annoying habit of constructing a trivial example to explain an opponent鈥檚 point of view 鈥� and then using that very example to diminish their work.
Marks reserves his particular spleen for the Great Ape Project and the group of people who are appealing for human rights to be extended to chimps, gorillas and orang-utans on the basis of our shared genetic inheritance. He points out that the countries where these primates live (Rwanda and Indonesia, for example) generally have pretty dismal records on human rights, let alone extending them to other species. Whatever the 98 per cent entitles chimps to, he complains, people will always be 100 per cent human.
To be fair, there has been a lot of woolly thinking about the relationship between great apes and people. Clearly, Marks feels there should be scientific steel among all the emotional meringue. But given today鈥檚 environmental crisis, Marks鈥檚 hyper-rationalist approach does seem akin to tuning Nero鈥檚 fiddle while Rome goes up in flames.
I hope this book will encourage greater clarity of thought among those who seek to preserve the great apes by using that 98 per cent figure to create empathy, sympathy and action for conservation.