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3 - We Are Not 98% Chimpanzee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2024

Jonathan Marks
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
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Summary

It had been well established by the 1920s that human and chimpanzee bloods were more similar to one another than horse and donkey bloods were. This was not particularly unfathomable, since humans and chimpanzees are rather similar, after all, but the special similarity of their blood was well known in educated circles at the time of the Tennessee “Monkey Trial” in 1925.

The similarity of the blood of humans and great apes remained an interesting fact until the 1960s, as the molecularization of biology was proceeding, and genes were shown to be linear instructions for the production of proteins, and proteins were shown to be long chains of amino acids. And when you painstakingly sequenced the 287 amino acids of human hemoglobin and gorilla hemoglobin, showed biochemist Emile Zuckerkandl in 1963, you found them to differ in only one or two places, for a difference of less than 1%.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • We Are Not 98% Chimpanzee
  • Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  • Book: Understanding Human Diversity
  • Online publication: 31 August 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009534314.004
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  • We Are Not 98% Chimpanzee
  • Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  • Book: Understanding Human Diversity
  • Online publication: 31 August 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009534314.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • We Are Not 98% Chimpanzee
  • Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  • Book: Understanding Human Diversity
  • Online publication: 31 August 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009534314.004
Available formats
×