What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes Hardcover – December 31, 2002

The concern many reviewers seem to have is that Marks didn't address what it means to be 98% chimpanzee. I thought his conclusions were clear: It doesn't mean much at all! It doesn't make humans 98% chimpanzee, or chimpanzees 98% human any more than we are 40% fish, because we share 40% of our DNA. Some scientists, however, have drawn unscientific conclusions from this genetic data. Some scientists have behaved improperly and unethically in accessing this data. And since science today has the authority of a secular religion, scientists have a responsibility to the public. They must be careful of their conclusions and careful of their treatment of people. One has only to look at pharmaceutical research to note another area of concern. I applaud Marks for speaking up about this and especially encourage undergrad students in the sciences to read it.

He's a bit political. If that doesn't bother you it's a great read with fun info about our differences and similarities. I prefer Jared Diamond because he's not political and irritated like Marks. Great info though!

"What it Means to be 98%Chimpanzee" is an accessible and very interesting book. Marks provides a thoughtful and well written response for much of the popular science that finds its way into the press and popular books. Elaborate inferences based on the suppostion that humans are "98% chimp" based on DNA similarities are quite typical and at times rather silly. This is one of the best books providing reasonable responses to an all to typical excess. The book is polemic, but it is also thoughtful and worthy of a careful reading. Enjoy.Timothy E. Kennelly

I got this book for my Anthropology class, and it was a pretty interesting book.

This book was recommended reading in my intro to Anthropology class at UPenn. I learned a lot from it and I generally agree with many of his premises and conclusions. It made me aware of many issues I have thought about vaguely that he makes clear and explicit and many others I never considered. I feel smarter for having read it.Unfortunately, there's a pervasive holier and lefter-than-thou self-righteous attitude throughout, that is probably counter-productive to his goals. I try to judge people on what they say and not how they say it, but I know arrogance turns off a lot of people.I work in the field and I am witness to the fact that genetics and modern genomics is a domain where a lot of what we call science is being done incredibly wrong. But Marks really delves into the issue in impressive detail.He could have done a better job of writing it in a way so as not to become dated so quickly. Like when he says "There is no class of data we could collect, short of finding a living Neandertal and tempting it with a modern mate, which would tell us whether it could in fact have interbred with us." Just a decade later we have the full Neandertal genome and we know people who live outside Africa are about 2.5% Neandertal and those native to Africa are 0%. So it has been proven rather conclusively that modern humans could and did interbreed with Neandertals.But he wasn't content with that, he went on to say the issue "borders on science but is actually in the realm of the unknowable. Could an extinct form of near-human have interbred with us? Not only don’t we know, but we cannot know. Things we cannot know are outside the domain of science."If we cannot know then how is it that just a few years later we do know? He criticizes scientist for their faulty logic, and then he turns around and does exactly the same thing by declaring something to be un-provable just because he can't think of a way to prove it. That's a classic rookie mistake in deductive reasoning and costs him some credibility points.Similarly, I wonder how he would re-write the Taxonomism section in light of 23andme. The girl he said was asking for meaningless information about her heritage would probably have been quite happy with the 23andme info. But maybe Marks would disagree.I think the following quote sums up a significant part of his message: "If you can’t do science without harming, victimizing, or stigmatizing people, you shouldn’t be doing it." That sounds great but it's also an unscientific criteria which he himself would surely discount if he were interested in doing so. Anything you do will help some people and hurt others. I think he's trying to make a name for himself by being the guy who informs the people of the evil ways of scientists. And to do that requires hyping his case as much as possible. One of the ways he does this is to choose who represents science so as best to support his view of how science works. There are scant few examples of anything he declares as being done right.One thing he ignores is that most of science is funded by the government and most of what the government funds is completely wasted money like most of what is called "defense" spending. For every dollar NIH gets to fund biomedical research productively, the defense department gets $20 to spend essentially as corporate welfare. Ultimately all of this money is being spent in the name of Keynesian economics, which says it doesn't really matter what they spend it on as long as they spend it. So any money spent on biomedical research is ultimately about jobs as much as it's about science. But that's not to justify the poor education of scientists, just to put it in some perspective.Nonetheless, I agree with a lot of what he has to say about how problematic is the way behavioral genetics has been done and the social/political forces at work. But I still think we should try to get to the bottom of the genetic component of things like intelligence and other aspects of behavior. That's not to say politics won't always try to exploit science for its own cynical purposes. Economics is even worse, academic economists do nothing but serve a propaganda function for power. But that's not to say it's impossible to study markets and money properly and therefore nobody should ever do it.This is a really apt quote:> The great paradox of modern science is that scientists are not> trained to think about science; they are trained to do it, to carry it> out. They are trained to use the machines with the flashing multicolored> lights, often in creative ways, to collect data—but not to> think about where knowledge comes from, or the relationship between> science and technology, or between scientific and nonscientific> modes of thought, or even about the growth and development of> their own field of science. These all fall within the domain of the> humanities; generally a scientist is expected to pick them up osmotically,> informally, passively.So true.In spite of the issues, all in all I'd have to recommend it as an important read for all scientists. Agree or disagree this book sets a excellent foundation for debate.

This book I bought for my husband. He is reading it and has enjoyed all of it so far. Thank you for letting him buy it to read.

I haven't read it yet. Im waiting for my college class to start it and well see how interesting it is!

If you are looking to get a serious knowledge on the consequences or convergence,in any aspect, of humans and chimps, since we share more than 98% similarity in our DNA, you'll be surprised to find that the title is one thing and another very different is the content of the book. As you read along the text you'll realize that the core of the book is mainly a harsh critic approach to science and scientists, in many ways. Sometimes it sounds like resentments. The author was unable to explain and expose clearly, if he even tried, what the title of the book claims. You won't find any clue or credible fact that links, at least in some features,humans and chimpanzees based on our 98% DNA similarity. The title is a catch; the context has nothing to do with the title.