Hmm humans and apes are quite different indeed....that 1.6% gene difference packs quite a punch.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/evolution/5695045/Are-human-beings-impossible-to-ape.htmlAbout 50 years ago, something happened that radically changed our ideas about what it meant to be human. A young secretary who had ventured into the African jungle witnessed a chimpanzee fashioning a tool out of a blade of grass, and using it to fish for termites. Jane Goodall had been sent to Tanzania by Dr Louis Leakey, who, on hearing her startling news, came up with an equally startling statement: "Now we must redefine 'tool', redefine 'man', or accept chimpanzees as humans."
During the Sixties, the then Dr Goodall, later founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, discovered more similarities between ourselves and chimpanzees: they can use stone tools; they have a rudimentary culture; their mothers teach their infants; they feel similar emotions to us, such as fear, sadness, happiness; and they grieve over lost loved ones.
Subsequently, genetic research started to shore up her theory that "the line between humans and other non-human beings, once thought so sharp, has become blurred". Movements sprang up such as the Great Ape Project, founded in 1993 by the bioethicist Peter Singer, which argued that apes should be awarded certain basic rights. And as genome mapping was developed, the genetic difference observed between humans and chimpanzees, our closest living ancestors, continued to shrink: it turned out that only 1.6 per cent of our genes were different.
This activity led to two basic conclusions: that humans and apes were not that different after all, and that if 98.4 per cent of our genes were shared with chimps, the remaining 1.6 per cent should explain why our development has differed so dramatically from that of our cousins.
Yet a new book, published last week, is attacking both assumptions. "Because we are virtually genetically identical, primatologists argue that in a logical sense, chimpanzees are very close to us cognitively," says Jeremy Taylor, author of Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. "The way this idea has bled into popular culture enrages me."
