Creation Moment 12/4/2022 - Those Two Developments Examined

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.  

Genesis 1:26

"Over the past half-century or so, dozens of dedicated Darwinists have devoted decades of their lives to studying the behaviour of apes and monkeys. The public is regaled with stories about the likes of Jane Goodall and Dianne Fossey living with chimps and mountain gorillas, respectively. The social structures, behaviors, communication and so on of apes and monkeys are scrutinized for the slightest evidence that they have thoughts and minds not all that far from our own. We are regularly left to conclude that the differences between mankind and these alleged ‘close relatives’ of ours are really minor ones of degree, not kind.

 

Two developments in particular have comforted and reinforced the masses in such evolutionary notions.

 

One was the allegedly high percentage of genetic (DNA) similarity which such primates hold in common with humans. Chimp DNA was supposed to be anywhere from 96% to 98.7% identical to that of humans, depending on who is telling the story. [Author’s update November 2022: In the interim, the estimated difference has been downgraded to somewhere between 13 and 19%. But even at the mythical 1%, it still represented a difference of tens of millions of DNA ‘letters’, an unbridgeable gap for evolution in the alleged time available (c. 6 million years).] 

Baboons are said to share 92% of their DNA with us. Granted a high degree of shared DNA, even if it were 90%, would that make them 90% human, as most interpret this? 

**It is worth repeating what prominent evolutionist Steve Jones once reminded his audience of in the context of man/chimp DNA-sharing: “We also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas and that doesn’t make us half bananas, either from the waist up or the waist down.”

 

The other development has to do with the issue of language. The chimpanzee Washoe and the bonobo Kanzi “have become famous for their ability to respond to human language in surprisingly complex ways”.

**It must be a great disappointment, then, for committed evolutionists to read of the latest work by two of the most dedicated primate behavior researchers in the world. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney are a husband-and-wife team who have performed many ingenious experiments with vervet monkeys and baboons, plumbing the depths of their social knowledge and mental processes.

Though they have occasionally revealed previously unknown ‘richness’ in a monkey’s social knowledge, overall their results have caused them to give a massive ‘thumbs down’ to the ‘monkeys are almost human’ view. They have gradually come to the conclusion (no surprise to Bible-believing Christians) that there are “severe limitations on intelligence and communication in monkeys”.

For instance, baboons walking past a recently dismembered buffalo carcass do not ‘put two and two together’ to conclude that lions are in the vicinity. They only act alarmed once they spot the actual lions. Also, when they see an antelope carcass stuffed high up in a tree, they show no signs of concluding the obvious—that their mortal enemy, the leopard, is in the vicinity.

For another example: Baboons from a foraging troop which has spread out so that some are on either side of a forest are known to give barking calls. It has long been assumed that they were keeping ‘contact’, saying, in effect, ‘Hey, we’re over here, where are you?’ like humans would. But ingenious experiments have shown that the monkeys were only lamenting their own lostness.

Seyfarth and Cheney say that, unlike humans, “monkeys don’t actually recognize that other monkeys have minds”. Whatever thoughts and emotions they may have, they cannot project them outside of themselves, as humans do all the time. Thus, a chimp may grieve due to loss, but chimps do not seem to comfort others that are grieving.

This inability to put themselves in another monkey’s place was starkly demonstrated when a monkey named Sylvia made a deep water crossing with a baby clinging to her underside, causing it to drown. Since she could breathe, she could not relate to the fact that her baby could not.

 

 Q: So what does all this do to the ‘genetic similarity’ issue? The (definitely non-creationist) writer of the Smithsonian article which inspired this piece concedes that these results remind us that ‘just a few percentage points can translate into vast, unbridgeable gaps between species’. 

**Of course, we have long been pointing out as above that a few percentage points means many millions of base pair differences—which are likely to be in much more crucial ‘controlling genes’. 

We were created with more similarities to apes than to jellyfish. Since our bodily construction reflects our DNA ‘recipe’, it is perfectly logical and consistent that we would also be genetically more similar to apes than to jellyfish—or to bananas, for that matter."

CMI