I Am Not a Chimp—And Neither Are You

As promised, I have a more extended piece up at the Weekly Standard Website demonstrating that the case for granting equal rights to chimpanzees with humans is not justified scientifically. First, I describe the ideological agenda behind the effort to reduce humans to the status of apes. From my column:

THERE IS A CONCERTED advocacy campaign underway across several disciplines aimed at knocking human beings off our pedestal of moral exceptionalism and redefining us as merely another animal in the forest. Toward this end, elements of the natural world are being personalized by public intellectuals, even as they seek to strip personhood from some people. The point of this ideological drive is to degrade our perceived self-worth so much that we will readily sacrifice human prosperity and welfare “to save the planet” or “for the animals,” while undercutting the power of theistic religion in general, and Judeo-Christian moral teaching in particular, to influence public policies.

But what about our alleged close genetic relationship with chimpanzees?

[T]he purported 94-98 percent [genetic]similarity [between humans and chimps]—whichever it is—doesn’t compare total genetic makeup, but only the DNA that “encodes proteins,” that is, that stimulates the production of the building blocks of our physical bodies and functions...

[R]ecent studies have surprised scientists, showing that [non coding]junk DNA isn’t really junk, but has a function. Research continues as to its exact purposes, but given the significant differences between human and chimp non-coding DNA, even if the purported 98 percent similarity of coding-DNA is true, it actually applies to only a small percentage of our total functional genetic makeup.

But what about the similarity between humans and chimps at the protein coding level? First, as Bill Hurlbut explains, even identical genes express differently across species, and hence, may produce different outcomes. Beyond that the “98%” identical meme masks tremendous biological differences, at least 40 million of which have been identified:

Forty million biological differences at the most fundamental biological level of life from whence our form and function spring is no mere crack in the pavement, as the likes of Goodall, Dawkins, and Singer would have us believe. No wonder geneticist Svante Paabo, a chimp consortium member based at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Science, “I don’t think there’s any way to calculate a number [of similarities between chimps and humans]. In the end,” he said, “it’s a political and social and cultural thing about how we see our differences.”

Which gets us back to what is really going on:

Ideology—not science—is the nub of the matter, reflecting a fervent desire among the “all we are is apes” crowd to destroy the cultural values explicitly upholding the highest moral worth of human beings. Society may choose to go the ape route, of course. But it is perfectly clear that the proposed radical changes in morality and law are not justified by current scientific understanding.

Out of necessity, the piece is a bit arcane, but I think it is important for those of us fighting off the assaults on human exceptionalism to know that the science supports our position, not that of the “all we are is apes” crowd.