• Question: What do you think about the creation of humans through apes?

    Asked by codylover69 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 27 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Hi codylover69-

      I feel an ‘evolution’ answer coming on…

      I think the idea that humans have evolved from apes, as first suggested by Charles Darwin, was a big step in biology. It changed the way we thought about the natural world, and our place in it, and yet now to me it seems so obvious!

      Evolution is a bit different from creation, because it describes a gradual change. Creation describes making something out of something else. We evolved from apes over thousands of years, because our environment made us better at doing certain things.

      So I think our evolution from apes, and evolution in general, is an amazing thing!

      thanks for your question 🙂

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Paul’s got most of it! The word ‘creation’ usually means that someone made something intentionally, whereas ‘evolution’ describes how something changed to become something else based on the conditions of the environment. What connects humans to apes would be evolution rather than creation 😉

      But there is one more point I’d like to make – we didn’t evolve FROM apes – apes and humans evolved from a common ancestor! So instead of apes being like our grandparents, they’re more like our cousins – our grandparents are something else altogether that went extinct a long time ago! That’s what people call the ‘missing link’ – the one last piece of the puzzle that we haven’t found yet in the fossil record, that would prove our relation to apes.

      So yes, as Paul said, I think evolution is an astounding thing. Everything that makes us different from apes, like standing upright or having complex languages or having a much higher intelligence, happened by gradual changes in our DNA over many many generations. I think this is a far more interesting, far more amazing story than a magical man in the sky making everything out of dirt in seven days 😉

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