Why Us?, by James Le Fanu
The past half-century has seen the most astonishing concentration of scientific discoveries in history. In physical terms, from the Big Bang to the Double Helix, our understanding of the universe, of life and ourselves has been extended with an intensity and on a scale that may never be repeated. And in terms of cracking the riddle of what allows ourselves and all other species to function, no discoveries held more promise than the unravelling of the genetic code which drives all life and of those workings of the human brain uncovered by neuroscience. But in each case, as Dr James Le Fanu shows in his enthralling book, these have brought us up against a dead end.
Having decoded the genome which we imagined might help to explain, inter alia, why we are different from monkeys, mice and sea urchins, we make the startling discovery that genetically we are all but identical.
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