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Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human is an exploration of why chimps and humans are far less similar than we have been led to believe. Genome mapping has revealed 
that the human and chimpanzee genetic codes differ by a mere 1.6%, but author Jeremy Taylor explains that the effects of seemingly small genetic difference are still vast. In the post below, he discusses how the discovery of “Ardi” deals a fatal blow to the chimpanzee ancestor myth.
Jeremy Taylor has been a popular science television producer since 1973, and has made a number of programs informed by evolutionary theory, including two with Richard Dawkins.
When discussing differences between chimpanzees and humans, I enjoy telling the hoary old joke about the traveler, lost in the midst of the Irish landscape, who approaches a farmer in a nearby field for directions. “Well,” says the farmer, on hearing his request, “If I were going to Kilkenny I wouldn’t start from here!”
I share this to highlight the point that we have chosen the chimpanzee as the bench-mark comparison with humans to help us answer the big questions as to how we evolved into humans, and when, for the simple reason that it is our nearest relative in terms of living DNA and behavior. But that does not mean that chimpanzees are cheek by jowl with us or that chimpanzees represent the perfect starting point. Those myriad genome scientists need no reminding from me that necessity has forced comparison with a species that is actually separated from us by twelve million years of evolutionary time since the split from the common ancestor–six million years for the branch that led to us, plus six million for the branch that led to them. Although we know even less about chimpanzee evolution than the precious little we have learned about the genetic changes that led to modern humans, it is clearly reasonable to assume that chimpanzees have not remained evolutionarily inert these past six million years and may well have evolved as far and as fast as we have–though not in the same direction.
Nevertheless, a number of primatologists who should know better, many great ape conservationists, large swathes of the science media, and therefore much of the lay audience, have become bewitched by incessant talk over the last few years about the extraordinary genetic proximity between apes and humans–what I call the 1.6% mantra–and the many cognitive and behavioral similarities that appear to have eroded the old idea of human uniqueness: tool manufacture and use, empathy, altruism, linguistic and mathematical skills, and an intuitive grasp of the way others’ minds work. All this has led to claims that chimps should be re-located, taxonomically, within the genus Homo, that they are more our brothers than our distant relatives, and that they should be therefore be accorded human rights. It has also led to the assumption that the common ancestor of chimps and humans must have looked and behaved very much like chimpanzees today and that our deep human ancestors must have clawed their way to us via a knuckle-walking chimpanzee-like stage before coming down from the trees, developing bipedality and bounding off into the savannas that were rapidly replacing dense forests due to climate change.
This “chimps are us” cozy day-dream has been dealt a welcome (to me) wake-up call by the publication of the discovery and analysis of the fossilized remains of Ardipithecus ramidus–”Ardi.” At 4.4 million years of age, she is perilously close to the time of the split from the common ancestor–and, as one of the main researchers, Tim White, is repeatedly quoted, “Ardi is not a chimp. It’s not a human. It’s what we used to be.” Ardi was clearly bipedal–she had a pelvis with a low center of gravity and had a foot structure which acted like a plate, allowing her to launch herself forward as she walked. Her hands were more flexible than a chimp’s, would have allowed careful palmigrade movement when in the forest canopy which would have supported her weight, and, crucially, would have presented more recent human ancestors with less evolutionary distance to travel to achieve the highly dexterous human hand essential for sophisticated tool use. Plant and animal remains found with her point to an environment of mixed forest and grassland in which she foraged omnivorously for nuts, insects and small mammals.
Was our common ancestor much more like Ardi than a chimp? Is the chimp we see today the result of six million years of specialized evolution away from this extraordinary biped with its mixture of primitive and derived features? Ardi seems fated to join two other odd-ball ancestors we have dug up in recent years: Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Toumai), who dates to approximately seven million years ago, around or before the split from the common ancestor–and Orrorin tugenensis, which dates between 5.8 and 6.1 million years. It is claimed that both were bipedal, though so little of the total skeleton in each case has been retrieved that these claims are open to dispute. Orrorin seems somewhat more similar to modern humans than the famous Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, is three million years older, and appears to have inhabited a similar mixed forest/grassland environment as Ardi. These misfits may have been very similar, or identical to, the common ancestor, and represent a much better approximation of the deep roots of the human tree than do chimpanzees.
Chimp-hugging conservationists have been over-playing their cards on chimpanzee-human proximity for years. Recent genomic research has unearthed a number of important structural and regulatory mechanisms at work in genomes that widen the gap between humans and chimps, and recent fascinating cognitive research with dogs and members of the corvid family of birds has shown that species that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago from both chimps and humans can out-perform chimpanzees on cognitive tests involving following human cues and in the making and use of tools, respectively.
We are not “the third chimpanzee”–chimps with a tweak. The difference between human and chimp cognition, in the words of American psychologist Marc Hauser, is of the order of the difference in cognition between chimps and earthworms. Chimpanzees–and the other great apes–are the only species for which we erect the idea of near-identity as the motivating force for conservation. We don’t beseech the general public to save the white rhino because we share over 80% of our genes with it, or the tropical rain-forest because we share over 50% of our genes with the banana. Although I would be first into the firing line in the battle to save chimpanzees and their natural environments from extinction I believe this resort to chimp-human proximity is a distraction and the wrong way to go about it. As Ardi is showing us, it is high time we stopped ourselves falling prey to this narcissistic anthropomorphism that brands chimpanzees as the “nearly man.” Chimps are not us!
Stuart Vyse is Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College, in New London. In his new book, Going Broke: Why Americans Can’t Hold On To Their Money, he offers a unique psychological perspective on the financial behavior of the many Americans today who find they cannot make ends meet, illuminating the causes of our wildly self-destructive spending habits. In the excerpt below Vyse looks at the psychology of credit limits. Check out the tips he provided us with this morning or his podcast.
The Magic of Credit Limits
It is a wonderful feeling. You apply for your first MasterCard, hoping to be accepted. Finally it arrives in the mail, and you feel like a million bucks. It is shiny and new, and it comes with a letter that tells you your credit limit. In most cases, this happy event occurs when you are quite young: just after graduation from high school or somewhere in your twenties. As a result, the credit limit often seems like an amazingly large figure. (more…)
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Happy Friday to all. Next week I will be at the Tools of Change Conference but have no fear, there will still be new posts on the blog. If you are at the conference please come introduce yourself to me! I’ll be the one with the laptop.
David Lehman’s playlist.
A co-worker sent me this poem and I can’t stop reading it again and again and again.
Cassady Day! (more…)
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D. Michael Lindsay is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University and is the author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. In the post below he reflects on the Republican candidates. This post originally appeared on The Immanent Frame.
Mike Huckabee’s early success in the primary season shows that evangelicals have political muscles to flex in the post-George W. Bush era. Just as scribes across the country were ready to write Huckabee’s political obituary, he came out of nowhere and won the Republican Caucuses in Iowa by nine points over Mitt Romney. He also did better in New Hampshire than many pundits predicted, and with South Carolina and many other states up for grabs in the next few weeks, Huckabee’s political star will continue to rise—at least for a few more weeks. (more…)
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To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.
Greg Galant is the publisher and CEO of Newsgroper.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro is my favorite book, even if weighted on a per page basis. This 1,336 page biography of Robert Moses is an insightful portrayal of power and New York. Caro contends that Moses was the most powerful non-elected official in American history who built modern day New York – for better or worse. (more…)
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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington. Kevin Coe is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. They are authors of the The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here. In the article below Domke and Coe reflect on Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech.
Mitt Romney’s much-discussed speech about “Faith in America” made one thing crystal clear: he believes liberty is a gift from God. (more…)
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The Surgeon General, Fortune 500 CEO’s, Politicians and Bono - powerful people that seem to exist in a different world with different rules. So how do they include their faith in their sometimes cut-throat professional worlds? In the second podcast from our interview with Michael Lindsay, he shares his interviewee’s takes on subjects ranging from medical ethics to making underwear ads less promiscuous - and finally lets us in on the strategy that is making the Evangelicals so successful in their rise to positions of power. The transcript of the audio is after the jump.
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Last spring, just as OUP was beginning to buzz with excitement for our fall books, D. Michael Lindsay, the author of Faith In The Halls of Power, came and talked to us. For the next couple of weeks I am going to share some of what he said. It the podcast below Lindsay tells the story of what happened when Bud McFarlane woke up from his attempted suicide attempt. The transcript of the audio is after the jump.
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The post below is by Theo Calderara, editor at OUP.
Evangelicals in politics get a lot of attention these days, much of it focusing on issues like abortion. But while everyone’s watching what James Dobson is doing in America, they’re missing what Rick Warren is doing in Africa.
Last night, Michael Lindsay spoke about his new book, Faith in the Halls of Power, at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. One of the many fascinating things the crowd heard is that while everyone thinks evangelicals have a lot of influence on domestic issues, they’re really making an impact abroad. (more…)
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Students everywhere are heading back to school. But is school the way you remember it? In the post below D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith In The Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined The American Elite, blogs about how faith has changed on campus, specifically evangelical faith. Read Lindsay’s other posts here.
Today, thousands of students will begin another year at Harvard, which begins its 369th year of classes. Since its founding, Harvard has been home to all kinds of religious believers, people of various faiths and of no faith at all. In recent decades, though, the nation’s leading university has diversified its student body geographically, ethnically, and racially. What’s surprising is how that diversity has changed Harvard’s religious makeup. (more…)
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D. Michael Lindsay is the author of Faith in The Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite and is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University. In the post below he examines the influence of religion on the military based on his experience interviewing prominent evangelical Americans. Read more by Lindsay here.
In the buildup to the General Petraeus’s appearance before Congress, we’ve been hearing a lot about partnerships between the American military and Sunni tribal leaders, like the so-called “Anbar Awakening.” These military leaders are often the only Americans Iraqis ever meet. And these leaders are more and more likely—especially at the elite level—to be evangelicals. (more…)
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This post is about introductions in more ways than one. First, let me introduce you to the author D. Michael Lindsay who will be blogging here quite a bit this fall. Lindsay is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University and the author of Faith In The Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined The American Elite. Faith In The Halls of Power draws on interviews Lindsay conducted with an array of prominent Americans — including two former presidents, dozens of political and government leaders, more than 100 top business executives, plus Hollywood moguls, intellectuals, athletes and other powerful figures. His book shows who the real evangelical power brokers are, how they rose to prominence, and what they’re doing with their clout.
In the post below Lindsay recounts introducing himself Karen Hughes in a bookstore. Would you have had the “chutzpah” to walk up and introduce yourself?
Sitting down with some of the nation’s most powerful figures to talk about their faith has been an exhilarating part of my life for the last five years. More than once someone said to me, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this stuff.” (more…)
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