Today I saw a list of some of the great questions humans have left to answer. These were along the lines of “What is consciousness?”, apparently a more pressing question than “Why the fuck can’t we stop killing each other?” My line of research being admittedly more geared toward the former type of question, I continued to scan the list. One of the questions was “How can humans and chimps be so different when they’re genomes are 98% similar?” Something strange struck me about the question, but I couldn’t put my finger on what until now, and that is, humans and chimps are not different.

How can I say that?! Look at this chimp! What a freakin’ idiot! Can you see that chimp building the Taj Majal, or being a mime? True, our species can speak, create, and has advanced technologically, so much so that to think of chimps achieving even a step in our direction strikes us as laughable. But a flaw in that argument for human superiority is that only as a species have we accomplished these feats. Could you build the Taj Majal. I couldn’t put two legos together or take a crap without help till I was 9. We have progressed as a species because of the collection of knowledge over 1000s of generations. Put a naked human raised in the wild next to a trained chimp and I doubt that our 2% dissimilarity will seem all that surprising. I think that a few modest improvements in language and memory (without humans being around, of course) would see our cousins doing as well as we are in the long run. Just saying.