Review of J. Marks, What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes.

  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(2): 386-87 (2003)

Chimpanzees are 98.44 per cent human, whereas daffodils are hardly human at all just 35 per cent. Harold Marks’s highly readable book is about the meaning of such authoritatively scientific facts. The style is chatty and informal, the chapters well organized, and the documentation and referencing very useful. The author is evidently in full scholarly command of his material.

If you specify mitochondrial instead of nuclear DNA, writes Marks, chimpanzees turn out to be 10 per cent different from humans, although mtDNA mutations have no discernible effect. Turning to human nuclear DNA, 70 per cent of the genome is ‘intergenic’, the sequences having no known function. Inside each gene, 95 per cent of the DNA again has no apparent function. The remaining sequences do seem to specify proteins. But Marks’s book is designed to explode what he calls ‘the central fallacy of molecular anthropology’– the notion that ‘deep down’, humans are ‘nothing but’ chimpanzees.

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Marks, Jonathan. What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: apes, people, and their genes. xiii, 312 pp., table, illus., bibliogr. London, Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 2002. £19.95 (cloth)