Post-Darwinian Evolution

A Commonplace Observation It is said that "we humans share more than half our genomes with flatworms; about 60 per cent with fruit flies and chickens; 80 per cent with cows; and 99 per cent with chimps."

This demonstrates something very important.

Namely, how little our genes signify.

Some folks take those percentages to show that humans are not all that different from cows or chimps. Others observe empirically that humans differ tremendously from these others -- you are not reading this on the bovine intertubes -- and wonder whether the genes are a meaningful metric of anything other than physiology.

The great scientific revolutions, Chastek once observed, turned on seeing the significance in things that were negligible within their context. The difference between a circular orbit and the actual elliptical orbits that the planets follow is negligible. The difference between the Newtonian and Einsteinian dispensations matter only at high speeds.  Yet the sliver of difference matters a great deal, even in so quotidian a thing as GPS. So the delta between man and monkey may well be very small genetically speaking -- but no one says we must speak only of genes.
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