The Fundamental Difference Between Humans and Nonhuman Animals

Jonathan Marks is a biological anthropologist who recently wrote an essay on the profound differences between human beings and apes. Paul Nelson and Ann Gauger have commented on him and his writing already (here and here). Marks's essay has sparked some controversy, but the point he makes is valid.

Marks asserts:

The argument that "we are apes" is not a valid evolutionary one. After all, the distinguished evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote in a 1949 classic, "It is not a fac...