Human Rights for Apes?

August 22, 2008

This week’s topic is a little, eh, heavy, so before we get into the question of whether apes should have some of the same rights now afforded to humans, here’s a picture of the Kiger household’s three resident canines. In case you’re wondering, the big strange-looking one is Madge. She’s a rare mix of Pit Bull and Basset Hound, a nascent breed of the sort that you’re unlikely to ever see trotting across the ring at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, a radical rule change notwithstanding. When she’s not using our living room couch for a trampoline, baying at imagined intruders or shredding important pieces of mail with her impressive set of teeth, Madge has a tendency to look at me soulfully with those big brown eyes, almost as if to say: “It’s hard to believe that, according to a 2005 study, the two of us have in common a mere 5 percent of our respective genome sequences.” To which I respond by sticking out my tongue and panting eagerly, which probably has a lot to do with why Victoria Stilwell has a TV show and I just write a blog.

If Madge were a chimpanzee, of course, it would be quite a different story. Another study, also published in 2005, sequenced a DNA sample from Clint, a male chimpanzee who died at age 24 from heart disease, and compared it with the human genetic blueprint. From a press release, here are their conclusions:

The consortium found that the chimp and human genomes are very similar and encode very similar proteins. The DNA sequence that can be directly compared between the two genomes is almost 99 percent identical. When DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96 percent of their sequence. At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimps and humans. In fact, the typical human protein has accumulated just one unique change since chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.

Chimpanzees’ genetic similarity to humans is so great that some scientists have proposed changing their scientific name to Homo troglodytes,and moving them to the same genus as the human species.