Chimpanzees

Note:

Please note that there exists no hypothesis or theory that has mankind descending from chimpanzees or any other kind of modern non-human ape. One should read the below answers as answering the question "Did we evolve from apes or did God create us".

Answer:

That really depends on your world view. If you are a religious person who believes in a particular creation myth--a myth is a collection of stories that describe the beliefs of a culture--then you are more likely going to reject anything that contradicts your beliefs. In such cases, people feel personal experiences trump scientific evidence. If you are less religious or more science-minded, you are more likely to accept the evidence that shows man and chimps had a common ancestor who lived in Africa roughly 7 million years ago. Genetics, anatomy, psychology, and paleontology supports this. However, again, it depends on your world view.

Answer:

The above is one view, but as someone who has researched this topic from both the "religious" and "scientific" perspectives, that is not all there is to it. Though it is presented to the public that ALL the scientific evidence points to evolution, it doesn't. There is scientific evidence for creation, too, and the evidence for evolution is not conclusive, making believing in creation more than a mere "creation myth."

If you want an answer to whether we evolved from chimpanzees or were created by God, it is something you have to decide for yourself. Some will claim that creation is totally religious based and that evolution is totally science based, which is just not the case. In order to come to an informed decision, you should approach the issue from the scientific perspective and find what science is available for each view. Don't expect your search to take a short time, though. The information is out there, but it takes effort to find it and put all the information together.

Answer:

The Jewish answer is that we have an unbroken national tradition of 3300 years to the Revelation at Sinai. God states that He created the universe (Genesis 1:1; Exodus 20:10) and human beings (Genesis ch.1-2). This tradition is accepted by Christianity and Islam also. God's creation of the universe explains the vast wisdom found within it.

There are also some people who believe in Creation without quoting the Bible. Their reasoning includes:

1) The glaring lack of transitional fossils has been noted by the evolutionists themselves, such as this statement from the famous paleontologist and evolutionist George G. Simpson; quote: "The regular lack of transitional fossils is not confined to primates alone, but is an almost universal phenomenon."

"The lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real; they will never be filled" (Nilsson, N. Heribert).

"To the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation" (Corner, E.J.H., Contemporary Botanical Thought).

2) Instances of falsifying of evidence by evolutionists, such as Haeckel's drawings, Archaeoraptor, the Cardiff "specimen," and Piltdown Man.

"Haeckel exaggerated the similarities [between embryos of different species] by idealizations and omissions, in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent. His drawings never fooled embryologists, who recognized his fudgings right from the start. The drawings, despite their noted inaccuracies, entered into the standard student textbooks of biology. Once ensconced in textbooks, misinformation becomes cocooned and effectively permanent, because textbooks copy from previous texts. We do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks (Stephen Gould).

Dr. Jonathan Wells published a book in 2002 entitled Icons of Evolution. Dr. Wells states that the book shows that "the best-known 'evidences' for Darwin's theory have been exaggerated, distorted or even faked."

3) Creationists see the "survival of the fittest" and the dating of rock layers by fossils as being perfect tautologies.

4) The fact that some qualified, educated, normal scientists do not believe in evolution. Or at least question it, even if they still preach evolution: "Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species" (Dr. Etheridge, Paleontologist of the British Museum).

"To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts. It amazes me that this is swallowed so uncritically and readily, and for such a long time, by so many scientists without murmur of protest" (Sir Ernest Chain, Nobel Prize winner).

5) The fact that there is a shared, worldwide tradition among every ancient society that the world was created.

6) Evolving of new species has not been witnessed during known history.

7) Mutations are harmful, not beneficial. One of the tasks of DNA and of long-term breeding is to avoid or repair any changes brought about by mutations. This means that our genetic apparatus is programmed to resist change.

8) Mutations, even if beneficial, do not create new organs.

9) The fact that a great number of fossils have been found in the "wrong" rock-layers according to what evolutionary paleontology would require.

10) The fact that you need DNA to make DNA. No genetic code can be demonstrated to have arisen by chance, together with the ability to read that code and carry out its instructions. Information does not arise spontaneously; and there is an incredible amount of information in even the tiniest cell.

"A living cell is so awesomely complex that its interdependent components stagger the imagination and defy evolutionary explanations" (Michael Denton, author).

"The astounding structural complexity of a cell" (U.S. National Library of Medicine).

Concerning a single structure within a cell: "Without the motor protein, the microtubules don't slide and the cilium simply stands rigid. Without nexin, the tubules will slide against each other until they completely move past each other and the cilium disintegrates. Without the tubulin, there are no microtubules and no motion. The cilium is irreducibly complex. Like a mousetrap, it has all the properties of design and none of the properties of natural selection" (Michael Behe, prof. of biophysics).

11) The problem of the impossibility of abiogenesis in general. "The concept of abiogenesis is not science. It's fantasy" (J.L. Wile, Ph.D.).

12) The fact that evolution was once used as support for the belief that Blacks (or others) are less than highly-evolved humans. "Darwin was also convinced that the Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the black races" (Steven Rose, author). He also "reasoned that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females" (B. Kevics, author).

13. The first and second laws of thermodynamics point clearly to a Creator, since things undergo entropy rather than get more orderly over time.

14. "Radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age-estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often very different. There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological clock. The uncertainties inherent in radiometric dating are disturbing to geologists and evolutionists." William D. Stansfield, Ph.D., Instructor of Biology, California Polytechnic State University.

15. "Even total rock systems may be open during metamorphism and may have their isotopic systems changed, making it impossible to determine their geologic age." Prof. Gunter Faure (Department of Geology, The Ohio State University, Columbus.)

16 a). At current rates of erosion the amount of sea-floor sediments actually found do not support a "billions of years" age for the Earth.

b) The amount of Sodium Chloride in the sea, also, is a small fraction of what the "old Earth" theory would postulate.

c) The Earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast to extrapolate a long age for the Earth.

d) The rate of accumulation of Moon-dust has been measured; and the amount of dust on the Moon was found to be vastly less than what scientists had predicted before the Moon-landings.

e) Helium is generated by radioactive elements as they decay. The escape of this helium into the atmosphere can be measured. According to the Evolutionary age of the Earth there should be much more helium in the atmosphere, instead of the 0.05% that is actually there.

The evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from earlier ape ancestors is one of the central topics within evolutionary biology. The study of human evolution uses many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, and genetics.

The exact lineage that traces humans back to their ancestors is still unclear, and the classification of humans and their relatives has changed considerably through time. Genetic evidence suggests that the human lineage split from the lineage that would lead to chimpanzees around 8 million years ago. The genus Australopithecus, which first appeared around 4 million years ago, is now thought to be the ancestor of the genus Homo, to which we belong. Australopithecus was an evolutionary milestone for humans, because they are the earliest known apes to begin walking upright. Walking upright lead to many advantages, including the further development of the brain. Australopithecus gave rise to the Homogenus.

Homo habilis lived about 2 million years ago and is called the "handy man" because he is currently the earliest known hominid to manufacture primitive stone tools. There is still some debate on whether habilis should be considered a separate species. He may have instead been a late Australopithecine or an early erectus. Homo erectus evolved an even more complex brain that was similar to humans, so complex that it is believed he developed speech. He also made weapons, discovered fire and used it to cook his food. Homo heidelbergensis may or may not be the direct common ancestor of both Homo sapiensand Homo neanderthalensis. Anatomically and behaviorally modern humans are believed to have first appeared between 50,000-100,000 years ago.

The mental and social capacities of humans have evolved too. From the beginning, the ancestors of humans were social animals. An individual ape was never strong enough nor fast enough to fend for itself or be safe from predators, so they had to rely on living in cooperative groups to protect from the dangers of a hostile world. Many of the social characteristics of humans, including compassion, cooperation, curiosity, inventiveness and competitiveness existed well before Homo sapiens emerged and some ape species of today also have them. As we became smarter, we came up with social structures that were more organized and more complex, assigning leaders to groups and establishing primitive government systems to ensure the well-being of all members. Early Homo sapienswere nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in small social groups. The invention of agriculture gave rise to modern, structured communities.

Human evolution is not one continuous series, as illustrations you may have seen would have you believe. Rather, human evolution is more like a branching tree containing many different ape species that have appeared and long since died out. We are still trying to figure out exactly how humans are related to these species.

Evidence for human evolution is found not only from the transitional fossils we uncover but our genetic and anatomical similarities with our ape relatives. We share between 95-99% of our genome with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Fossils of several different hominid species have been found, and upon being closely examined and dated, show relatedness to humans at varying degrees. Paleontologists have always been hard at work piecing together the puzzle and connecting the dots fossil by fossil, in order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of humans as accurately as possible. There have been great strides in the study of human evolution, and while many questions remain, they continue to be answered as more research is done.

There are some questions regarding humans that the theory of evolution itself may not be able to answer, especially moral and existential questions. The role of science is to explain how we came to be, not why we exist or what our purpose is. The answers to these questions lie in philosophy and religion, not science. Nevertheless, there is evidence beyond reasonable doubt that humans are descended from earlier prehistoric apes, and that we are closely related to other apes of today, and the gaps in the human lineage continue to be filled as more research is done and more fossils are uncovered.

In the beginning humans were apes and kept on evolving because the environment was forcing them to change.They kept evolving until the way they look today, so if they keep on evolving(today they stand upright)and maybe a thousand years from now we will be looking straight up.

Human evolution is one of the central topics within evolutionary biology. It attempts to explain the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and mammals. The study of human evolution uses many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics and genetics.

While we have made great strides in the study of human evolution, there remains many unanswered questions. Just because these questions remain unanswered for now does not mean we will not find the answers in the future with more hard work and research.

One thing is for sure, humans evolved from earlier primate ancestors. The exact lineage that traces humans back to their ancestors is still unclear, and the classification of humans and their relatives has changed considerably through time. The genus Australopithecus is now thought to be the ancestor of the genus Homo, to which we belong. Australopithecus was an evolutionary milestone for humans, because they are the earliest apes to begin walking upright, and walking upright lead to many advantages, including the ability to develop more intelligence. Australopithecus gave rise to Homo species such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and ultimately Homo sapiens.

Human evolution is not one continuous series, as illustrations you may have seen would have you believe. Rather, human evolution is more like a branching tree containing many different primate species that have appeared and long since died out. We are still trying to figure out how exactly humans are related to these species.

It is believed that the mental and social capacities of humans evolved too, as the ancestors of humans developed larger, more complex brains, and social structures also became more complex. Humans rely on living in groups to survive which is why it was essential for us to develop beneficial and cooperative social behaviors and structures that ensured the success of our species.

There are some questions the theory of evolution itself may not be able to answer, especially moral and existential questions. The answers to these questions lie in philosophy and religion, not science. Nevertheless, there is evidence beyond reasonable doubt that humans are descended from earlier prehistoric apes, and that we are closely related to other apes of today, and the gaps in the human lineage continue to be filled as more research is done and more fossils are uncovered.