Taylor: Not A Chimp

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Jeremy Taylor, Not A Chimp : The Hunt to Find the Genes that Makes Us Human. Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009. xv + 338 pages; illustrated; includes bibliographic references and index.

I was fully prepared to not enjoy this book at the outset, because while I am interested in the topic, I don't necessarily agree with the author's premise. The first chapter didn't do much to change my mind, with a gruesome description of a brutal chimpanzee attack on his former owner, to highlight the "wildness" of even those chimps which have been raised by people. I agree that keeping a wild animal as a pet is never a good idea, but I'm not sure it was necessary to Taylor's thesis to include this particular story.

Taylor's primary issue is the often-touted claim that humans and chimpanzees are 98% genetically identical, and how this premise is being used (and in his opinion misused). The problem is that this estimate is based on data that is half a century old, and our knowledge of genomics has come a long way in that time.

Taylor points out a common misconception, which I also note in my introductory physical anthropology courses, that while chimpanzees may be our closest genetic relatives, our common ancestor existed 6 million years ago by most estimates. Doing the math, that means that humans and chimps have 12 million years of evolution between them, because chimps have been evolving away from the common ancestor, in response to their own set of selection pressures, just as long as our own species has. Chimpanzees are not a good model for how our common ancestor looked or behaved necessarily, any more than modern humans are.

Taylor makes a point to detail just how different chimpanzees are from us, and how other species are better at particular behaviors than our closest genetic cousins. Crows, for example, can solve many of the same tool-use puzzles as chimpanzees, and perform better on certain "theory of mind" tasks (being able to account for the state of mind or knowledge possessed by others when considering an action).

I had a couple of technical issues with this book, as well. I found it difficult to discern exactly what audience Taylor was aiming to reach, as his premise -- that while chimpanzees and humans share genetic similarities, there are also important differences -- is well-known in the field. On the other hand, he spends a lot of real estate naming all the authors involved in particular studies, which I found distracting rather than informative. That's what the bibliography is for, and footnotes or end notes would have been more appropriate than naming everyone involved. The average reader won't care, and the specialist reader will either already know who is doing the research, or can easily can find the relevant information in PubMed or Google Scholar. And my credibility radar went off at the misuse of the word "theorizing" (Chapter 11) in place of "hypothesizing".

I also question the utility of reading books about genomic science in general, because the field moves so quickly that by the time a book goes to press, much of the information is out-dated. For example, in the chapters on cognition, Taylor references Marc Hauser, the now discredited Harvard researcher, no less than eight times.

Overall, while Taylor presented some interesting points, an anthropological geneticist would be better served reading the primary literature than Not a Chimp.

-- Notes by GKY