Are we more than affluent apes?.

Now all this makes sense, until we come down to ourselves. After all, cogito ergo sum. It is all very well to talk about the evolution of consciousness, of neural potentials and feedback mechanisms, but most of us have more than a sneaking suspicion that there is more to being human than merely being an affluent ape. Which is why the unravelling of the causal chain from copulation to childhood via cell biology, DNA chemistry, gene action, epigenetic switching, and so on, is vaguely disturbing. And why it is more difficult to adjust to the possibility of reproduction in a test-tube than it was to adjust to the clinical and pharmaceutical niceties of a well-planned family. In other words, we are scared by the prospect of genetic determinism and all its implications.