A nice review for the genetics part of not a chimp from genomics scientist Norman Johnson, with comments on cognition and behaviour from the book to come in later posts:
"As the title suggests, Jeremy Taylor's main thesis in Not a Chimp is that humans are not chimps and chimps are not humans, despite the apparent genetic similarity of these two primates. Taylor, who has had a long career in producing science documentaries, supports this claim from studies in two broad areas: genetics and behavior. In this first post, I'll discuss some of the genetic data. Later, I will cover the behavioral/psychological studies.
Taylor begins with some of the genes that differ between humans and chimpanzees and that show the signature of positive selection operating as these genes changed along the positive lineage. This is much-travelled ground; many books, including my own, have covered what we have learned about these genes. Still, Taylor brings new insight. For instance, consider the much-discussed FOXP2 gene. This gene, which has been touted by some as "the language gene", plays some role in language, speech, motor control, and possibly other aspects of cognition in humans. We know this based on studies of the KE family from the U. K., in which a mutation affecting those phenotypes is transmitted as an autosomal dominant allele. This gene has become of interest to evolutionary biologists because the amino acid of the protein it encodes has evolved more since humans diverged from chimpanzees than it has since primates diverged from rodents. Such a pattern, along with other evidence, strongly supports the hypothesis that positive selection has acted on this gene. But what does the gene do? Here's where Taylor shines. He presents the backstory showing the debates linguists, cognitive scientists, and others had during the 1980s and 1990s (long before we knew about the gene!) regarding the nature of the phenotypes affected by the mutation in the KE family. Taylor also does an important service reminding us that the mutation in the KE family is not one of the changes that have occurred at FOXP2 between humans and chimps.
In addition to the structural genes that differ between humans and chimps, we also differ in regulatory sequences. These regulatory sequences affect the expression (the amount of protein produced) of genes, both in space and in time. As Taylor presents, it turns out that we and chimpanzees differ substantially in gene expression. Such differences are most pronounced in the brain. We also differ - to a surprising extent- in the number of copies of genes that we have. Such copy number variation (CNV) is one of the major findings in human genomics in the past five years. Exactly how CNV affects phenotypes is still being worked out, but some cases are already known. For instance, CNV in specific genes affects susceptibility to progressing to full-blown AIDS after HIV exposure. The regulatory differences and CNV between humans and chimps shows that we are not as genetically similar to the other apes as we once thought we were.
Reference:
Taylor, J. Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. Oxford University Press (2009)."