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Memo To The Smithsonian: Make Humans Exceptional Again
Pressed by the Trump Administration, the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents has ordered a review of its museums for what President Trump calls “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.” Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation observes that “The ordered review can’t come fast enough.”
He writes:
The Smithsonian has wholeheartedly enlisted in the leftist imperative to “decolonize the American mind” and to change America’s narrative from one that made citizens proud of this nation’s astonishing achievements to a counternarrative that focuses on where America has fallen short and drums shame into citizens. Unfortunately, this shift has accelerated since [Dr. Lonnie] Bunch became the leader of the Smithsonian in 2019.
Gonzalez provides dismaying examples from the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Also in need of fixing, however, is the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The nation’s museum shouldn’t be in the business of shaming the nation. But neither should it be in the business of belittling human beings, by all but equating us with chimps.
Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC) has given extensive attention to the false science being fed to the nearly 4 million yearly visitors to the NMNH. Dr. Casey Luskin, Associate Director of the CSC, recently wrote an open letter to Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s Secretary, raising concerns about the Human Origins exhibit which states that “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.8% genetically similar.” It also says, “There is only about a 1.2 percent genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees throughout much their genetic code.”
Those figures, often repeated by science media and science educators, are known to be quite inaccurate. That’s mostly due to a recent paper published in the journal Nature. Much-needed explaining of the paper’s results has appeared in a series by Dr. Luskin at Evolution News on the “1 percent myth.” In fact, the human-chimp genetic difference is not 1 percent but 14.9 percent. The Smithsonian also misstates the degree of genetic difference between human and gorillas and between humans and orangutans. Luskin writes:
According to data reported in a scientific paper, Yoo et al. (2025), recently published in Nature, these statistics are scientifically false. This paper presented for the first time “complete,” de novo, updated, telomere-to-telomere sequences of the genomes of various ape species. These “complete” genome drafts are vastly improved over previous drafts of ape genomes. Yoo et al. (2025) is thus able to provide much improved calculations of the actual degrees of genetic difference between human and ape genomes at a level of comprehensiveness and accuracy that has been previously unavailable.
The paper Luskin refers to is by geneticist DongAhn Yoo at the University of Washington and his colleagues, “Complete sequencing of ape genomes,” Nature, 641: 401-418 (May 8, 2025).
Why does it matter? After all, any visitor to another Smithsonian facility, the National Zoo, will quickly be able to detect that there’s a lot more than 1 percent — in fact a lot more than 14.9 percent — difference between the chimps at the zoo and the human beings gazing at them. There is no chimp equivalent of the Smithsonian, with chimp curators educating chimp visitors about chimp origins. There are exactly zero displays of humans at zoos available for chimps to casually observe.
As I discuss in my new book “Plato’s Revenge,“ these percent differences are evidence that something transcending the genetic information in DNA must be directing the development of organisms. Evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg and others have made similar arguments.
Regardless, the 1 percent myth is intended to be a put down to human significance — to the exceptional status of human beings in nature, and in the cosmos as far as we know. Yet, when popular atheist scientists like Bill Nye “The Science Guy” brandish the term, it results in human self-hatred, what we might call the “‘I Suck’ Principle,” now a staple of atheist rhetoric.
As Nye put it in a speech to the American Humanist Association, speaking (as he sees it) on behalf of all human beings, “I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck!”
The false percentage figures are as worthy of being corrected as the insults to American greatness found elsewhere at the Smithsonian. Yet, when challenged on it, a museum spokesman answered with the equivalent of a, “Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get back to ya on that sometime.” As Elizabeth Shenk at World Magazine reported, “The Smithsonian replied that, if it ever updates its numbers, it will take the study into account.” That non-answer should not be acceptable to the taxpayers who foot the bill at the museum.
Whether humans are unique or just another beast in the forest is among the most consequential questions we can ask ourselves. On it, there hangs the difference between a noble culture and a depraved, animalistic one. The Smithsonian audit is indeed overdue, but it should include not only the insults to us as Americans but to us as human beings.
* * *
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute. He is the author most recently of Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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