Every schoolboy has been told that to understand human nature we must look to our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees.

Jane Goodall's pioneering research revealed that chimps use tools hunt cooperatively and engage in

violent activity that looks like warfare. And from these observations, she and generations

of scientists who followed in her wake have concluded that humans are essentially advanced

primates, and that our behaviors, from violence to sexuality, flow from this

genetic inheritance. But what if this foundational assumption is wrong? Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm

your host, Jonathan Silver. The Primate Myth, Why the latest science leads us to a new theory of

human nature, is a new book by the playwright and critic

Jonathan Leif. Jonathan has absorbed vast quantities of scientific literature, and he argues

that recent genetic and neuroscientific discoveries are overturning decades of conventional wisdom.

A landmark study published in April 2025 revealed that humans

share only 86.5% of our genes with chimps, not the 98.6% we've long believed. More importantly,

the differences are concentrated precisely where they matter most, in the structures

of our brains that govern cooperation, empathy, and language.

Leaf's thesis is both scientific and moral.

If humans are not primarily aggressive primates, but rather cooperative pack animals, closer

in crucial ways to dolphins and wolves

than to chimps.

Then it's high time to reconsider the natural impulses that lie at the roots of war,

of family, and of human flourishing.

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