In a recent online video, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson made a striking observation. Chimpanzees, he said, share nearly 99 percent of their DNA with human beings—yet while chimp intelligence is limited to tasks such as figuring out how to stack boxes to reach a banana, humans have created cities, symphonies, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Tyson then imagined a species just 1% “smarter” than us. To such beings, he speculated, humans might seem as primitive and chimpanzees seem to us, and a species with a 5% advantage might regard us the same way that we regard flies and other insects.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, but it rests on assumptions that deserve a closer look. The more we learn about genetics, cognition, and artificial intelligence, the less clear it becomes that “intelligence” is a single measurable quantity that can be captured in a simple percentage.
The Myth of the One Percent Gap
The claim that humans and chimpanzees differ by only one percent genetically dates back to early genome-comparison studies that looked only at single-nucleotide substitutions—essentially, one-letter changes in the DNA code. But DNA isn’t a static string of letters; it’s a living, dynamic system with insertions, deletions, duplications, regulatory switches, and vast stretches of “noncoding” DNA that control when and how genes are expressed.
When modern geneticists factor in those structural and regulatory differences, the real gap between human and chimp genomes rises substantially—perhaps 5 to 15 percent, depending on how it’s measured. That’s still small compared to the gulf between humans and dogs, but it’s not a neat one-number summary that maps easily onto intelligence.
What distinguishes humans is not just the raw sequence of our DNA, but how that DNA is expressed—especially in the brain. Subtle changes in developmental timing and gene regulation can produce huge effects, not because the genome is fundamentally different, but because its orchestration changes. In that sense, the “one percent” statistic is more poetic than scientific: a metaphor for small causes with vast consequences.
Are Humans Really the Smartest? The Case of the Whales
Tyson’s comparison also assumes that human intelligence is vastly superior to that of other species, but that assumption is far from settled.
Consider the great whales—creatures with brains larger than ours, some of which contain more spindle neurons (associated with emotion and social reasoning) than the human brain. Sperm whales, humpbacks, and orcas display rich social lives, tool use, and cultural transmission across generations. Their communication systems include complex vocalizations, rhythmic clicks, and songs that vary by region and evolve over time.
Projects like Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) are now using AI pattern recognition to analyze sperm whale clicks in search of structure and meaning. The findings so far suggest the possibility of syntax-like organization, and researchers have identified recurring patterns that function almost like an alphabet—a whale equivalent of phonemes or syllables. These patterns vary by context, suggesting that whales may convey information about identity, behavior, or emotion. As yet, we still cannot translate their communications, nor even be sure how close we are to understanding them.
If humans encountered another species on Earth that used symbolic sounds to communicate across miles of ocean, had long-range social bonds, cooperative hunting strategies, and apparent regional dialects, we would likely recognize it as intelligent — perhaps even as a “civilization of the deep.” Whales appear to meet these criteria. Perhaps the fact that we cannot understand their language should make us cautious about assuming we are more intelligent than they are.
It may be that our primary advantage is not that we think more deeply than whales, but that we write. Unlike whales, we have hands and opposable thumbs, which allow us to carve, paint, and inscribe. The invention of writing—and later of printing and digital storage—enabled humans to preserve, accumulate, and transmit knowledge across space and time. Whales may sing across oceans, but we can send our thoughts across centuries. That ability to store language outside the body has compounded intelligence in ways that biology alone could never achieve.
Writing as a Technology of Intelligence
The advantage of written language doesn’t just differentiate humans from other species; it also divides human societies themselves. Societies that developed written languages had clear advantages over pre-literate societies. As Jared Diamond observes in Guns, Germs, and Steel:
Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest. The commands of the monarchs and merchants who organized colonizing fleets were conveyed in writing. The fleets set their courses by maps and written sailing directions prepared by previous expeditions. Written accounts of earlier expeditions motivated later ones, by describing the wealth and fertile lands awaiting the conquerors. The accounts taught subsequent explorers what conditions to expect, and helped them prepare themselves. The resulting empires were administered with the aid of writing. While all those types of information were also transmitted by other means in preliterate societies, writing made the transmission easier, more detailed, more accurate, and more persuasive.
In pre-literate societies, knowledge was transmitted orally—through stories, rituals, and recited traditions. There is considerable evidence that people in pre-literate societies actually possess better memories than people who can read and write, but nevertheless reliance on memories puts limits on the amount and precision of knowledge that can be shared. The ability to write things down liberated knowledge from those constraints. It made information portable, cumulative, and permanent. Once knowledge could be recorded and revisited, the entire structure of culture changed. Laws, contracts, histories, and technical instructions could be codified, refined, and shared beyond the lifespan of any single human being.
The power of writing, therefore, wasn’t merely communicative—it was civilizational. It enabled the creation of institutions that could endure across generations: governments, religions, universities, corporations. In this sense, literacy acts as a cognitive multiplier: the written word allows the collective mind of a society to store and process information orders of magnitude more efficiently than any individual brain.
Language as the True Human Superpower
The evolutionary leap that gave rise to humanity’s dominance may not have been raw intelligence in the neural sense but rather the emergence of symbolic language—and, later, externalized language through writing. Chimpanzees and dolphins can communicate, but humans can abstract, record, and recombine ideas endlessly.
This means that human intelligence is not just biological, but distributed—a hybrid of neurons, words, and tools. The philosopher Andy Clark and cognitive scientist David Chalmers described this concept in their influential paper The Extended Mind. According to their view, cognition doesn’t stop at the skull; it extends into notebooks, computers, and social systems. When you write a note to remember something or consult a map or Google a fact, your thinking literally merges with the external world.
In that sense, our species’ intelligence is as much cultural as it is biological. A newborn human brain is not inherently that much smarter than a newborn chimpanzee’s. What changes everything is the download that our language ability lets us receive from culture—mathematics, stories, moral frameworks, and technologies. The entire history of human civilization can be seen as a recursive feedback loop between biology and culture: minds creating tools that reshape minds.
What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Ourselves
This brings us to ChatGPT and other large language models, which have suddenly forced humanity to confront the primacy of language. These systems are trained not on sensory data or physical experience, but on text—the accumulated output of human symbolic communication. And yet they can reason, explain, create, and converse with astonishing fluency.
Does this mean computers are becoming intelligent? Perhaps. But it also suggests something humbling: that much of what we call “intelligence” may be linguistic pattern recognition—the ability to find structure and meaning in the ocean of symbols we humans produce. LLMs are not conscious, embodied, or emotional, yet they can reproduce many of the outward features of human thought simply by statistically predicting language.
This doesn’t diminish human intelligence; it clarifies it. The ease with which machines can now perform language tasks reminds us that language itself—not the body or the soul—has long been our most powerful mental prosthetic. Like writing, AI represents another offloading of cognition into an external system. It is the next step in the process that began when early humans scratched marks on clay tablets.
The current generation of AI also reveals what it lacks. It has no proprioception, no lived experience, no social emotions or sense of mortality. It is a linguistic engine detached from embodiment. That separation underscores how incomplete purely linguistic intelligence is when divorced from perception, memory, and purpose. Humans integrate all of these into a single continuum of cognition. Machines do not—at least not yet.
Rethinking Tyson’s Thought Experiment
Neil deGrasse Tyson imagined a species that might be one percent or five percent more intelligent than humans, but evolution doesn’t always advance through “more intelligence” in the linear sense. Sometimes it’s a change of medium, not magnitude—a shift from neural tissue to symbolic systems, from spoken words to writing, from writing to computation. Each step multiplies the connectivity and persistence of knowledge, which in turn reshapes the environment that produces further innovations.
The next great leap, therefore, may not come from DNA at all. It may come from our continued ability to externalize thought, to build symbiotic systems that amplify understanding. Humans already did this when we created culture, language, and writing. Artificial intelligence might simply be the latest extension of that same evolutionary arc—a cognitive ecology in which biology and technology co-evolve.
If so, then the key question isn’t “What comes after humans?” but “How do we collaborate with (and within) the minds we’re creating?” Just as we learned to communicate with each other across distances and generations, we are now learning to communicate between flesh and silicon, neurons and code. The story of intelligence may turn out to be the story of connection, not competition.
A Broader Perspective
When we step back, the supposed gulf between species—and between humans and machines—looks less like a ladder and more like a web. Intelligence is not a single axis of “smartness” but a diverse ecosystem of ways to process information: whales through sound and social bonds; chimps through cooperation and tool use; humans through symbols and writing; and AI through computation and pattern recognition.
Our species’ greatest gift may not be the size of our brains but the flexibility of our interfaces—the ability to translate thought into marks, speech, music, or code, and to link those forms together into something larger than ourselves. That’s why civilizations arise not just from biology but from communication.
And that, perhaps, is the real moral of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s thought experiment. A difference of one percent or five percent matters less than how effectively a species can share and preserve what it learns. Chimps can imitate and whales can sing, but humans can write symphonies, laws, and algorithms that endure long after we are gone. Our intelligence is cumulative, not innate. It lives not in our genes, but in the vast and growing archive of our shared mind.
If the true engine of intelligence lies in the ability to connect, communicate, and accumulate knowledge, then our greatest responsibility is to use that ability wisely. The one percent difference may be a myth, but the deeper truth remains: small changes in how information flows can reshape entire worlds. Whether the next great leap comes from a new species, a new technology, or a new form of collaboration, the story of intelligence is ultimately the story of life learning to speak to itself.
