Bonobos – Dispatches From The Front

Chimpanzees, along with bonobos, are humans’ closest living relatives. In fact, you may have heard that humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA.

But is this actually true? And what does “similar DNA” actually mean?

The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species’ genomes, experts told Live Science.

Human and chimp DNA is made of four basic building blocks, or nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The genomes of both species can be thought of as a “string of the letters A, C, G and T … about 3 billion letters long,” David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, told Live Science in an email.

When scientists compare human and chimp DNA, they identify the letter (nucleotide) sequence in both genomes and look for stretches of DNA where there is a lot of overlap between the two genomes. Then, they count the number of matching letters in these regions.

ANDY DUNN WAS RIDING HIGH. It was 2012, and he was running a hot e-commerce fashion company he’d co-founded. He’d cashed out seven figures’ worth of shares on the secondary market and was living like he thought a CEO in his early 30s in New York City should be living: large. He bought a black Porsche. He jetted off for weekends in Istanbul and Moscow, and ran up a $10,000 Four Seasons bill in Bali. He went out to clubs and restaurants almost every night: drinks with a potential hire at 6; a dinner date at 8; meeting a friend for more drinks at 10.

His company, Bonobos, had launched in 2007 and pioneered an online-first, brand-building model that just a few years later was being copied by entrepreneurs in every consumer-product category imaginable: direct-to- consumer eyeglasses, shoes, razors, dog food, luggage, undies, and more. Dunn started to see himself as a kind of godfather of a new consumer movement. He hired bright college grads to run customer service in-house in one of the world’s most expensive cities. He opened brick-and-mortar showrooms, dubbed Guideshops, at a time when legacy stores were flailing. Bonobos was early to social media marketing and omnichannel retail, and it helped usher in a whole new startup economy in New York.

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