What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee
In the 1990s, we routinely heard that we are just 1 or 2% different from chimpanzees genetically, and therefore . . . what? Should we accord the chimpanzees human rights, as some activists have suggested? Should we acknowledge and accept as natural the promiscuity and genocidal violence that lurks just underneath the veneer of humanity and occasionally surfaces, as some biologists have implied? Or should we perhaps all simply go naked and sleep in trees as the chimpanzees do?