For the umpteenth time, I’m going to explain why I do NOT believe humans evolved from apes. My atheist friends would like to attribute this rejection of a basic tenet of evolution theory to my personal religious beliefs, taking away the credit from where it belongs: a mental exercise in which I attempted to take the theory as an idea and applied it to reality.
Now, to first prove that I do understand the basic concepts of the theory fairly well, I shall describe the beliefs of evolutionists in a brief narrative: once upon a time, there were (now extinct) Old World apes. A small breeding population of these apes became separated from the main pack and evolved from Australopithecus to Homo Habilis and all the other homos until eventually becoming Homo sapiens. And why did humans evolve from apes? Well, because they could.
See the progression chart below.
The illustration is one of the primary reasons I’ve often derisively described macroevolution as “shape-shifting” because it is a truly remarkable belief to hold that the ancestor of the guy sitting behind the computer desk on the far right was the ape on the far left, once upon a time. One might also say it was ludicrous to believe it. However, a lot of people do believe just that, so the remainder of this article will explain my objections to the theory of ape-to-human evolution in fuller detail.
The key word in the sentence about shape-shifting is ancestor. How does one creature become a descendant of another creature? Bluntly stated, the ancestral creature has sexual intercourse with another creature and produces living offspring. The ancestral creature only has two choices: mating with another creature of the same species, or mating with a creature from a different species. Mating with another creature of the same species will produce fertile offspring of the same species.
However, if members of two different but closely related species mate, the result may be living but sterile offspring. For example, lions and tigers may mate in captivity and produce tigons and ligers, but these animals are invariably sterile, or biological dead-ends. Fertile offspring are only produced when lions mate with other lions, and tigers with other tigers.
Just as with every ape and every human, a lion has unique DNA formed when his or her parents mated. No two lions are identical. Some might be bigger or more vicious than others, but lions are going to be lions, and breed lions. Just like apes breed more apes. Animals strongly prefer to breed with other animals of the same kind. A polar bear might decide to mate with a grizzly bear and create a polizzly bear, but he’s never going to voluntarily mate with a caribou.
If you study the chart above more carefully, you’ll eventually realize that the God of evolution theory is Time. A theoretical common ancestor linking humans and horseshoe crabs can be found if enough Time is allowed. How does the bonobo ape (or chimpanzee) on the far left shape-shift into the creature on the far right, only because of sexual reproduction taking place in an isolated breeding population over long periods of time? It doesn’t.
The Chromosome problem
Lions and tigers both have 38 chromosomes in each cell. Humans have 46 chromosomes, and apes have 48. Why is this important?
Remember, lions and tigers can successfully interbreed, but they cannot produce fertile offspring. Humans and apes cannot interbreed and produce live offspring, and you don’t have to simply take my word for it–a Russian scientist named Ilya Ivanovich tried to impregnate chimpanzees with human sperm in experiments conducted during the 1920s. In his sales pitch to gain funding for his experiments, Ivanovich stressed that it was an experiment that could prove Darwin’s theory as to how closely related to apes humans are, which would be a blow against religion. But his experiments failed to produce a creature comparable to Oliver the “humanzee”, probably because of the difference in chromosome count between humans and apes.
Humans allegedly evolved from apes over a long period of time. Human chromosome 2 allegedly formed from two ape chromosomes “fusing” together in a process technically known as a Robertsonian translocation. As most people know, fusion is a process that typically happens instantaneously or at least very quickly. If human chromosome 2 truly formed by two ape chromosomes joining together, it would make the most sense for it to have happened very quickly , because any loss of significant chromosome information during any part of the evolutionary process would almost certainly result in the death of that organism. Loss of information is loss of important functionality.
Therefore, if we are to believe that humans evolved from apes and human chromosome #2 represents significant evidence of that evolution, we should assume that it happened instantaneously. So, how does that reconcile with the belief that humans evolved from apes over a very long period of time? Not very well, it seems. According to biologist Ken Miller, human chromosome #2 looks like somebody took a piece of Scotch tape and attached two chromosomes together at the telomeres. Could that somehow be the result of a slow and gradual process, or the work of an Intelligent Designer? Are we the result of slow and gradual Darwinian evolution, one of Goldschmidt’s hopeful monsters, or the product of a divine design? Intelligent Design would seem to make the most sense when one considers the ridiculous improbabilities that need to be overcome before the universe exists and life exists and evolution even becomes possible.
I suppose it is theoretically possible that the fusion event might have occurred when the transition from ape to Australopithecine occurred (assuming it did occur) and all the other differences and alleged beneficial mutations that accumulated during the progression from ape to human. Increased brain size, ability to walk upright, loss of body fur, etc. all happened simply because enough time allowing it to happen was available.
If you want to believe that, fine. You can believe anything is possible only if enough time is available. You can believe that humans shape-shifted from apes, simply because enough Time was available and because it was theoretically possible. There was no reason for it or purpose behind it, however. No reason the food chain exists except random chance, and luck of the draw. You can believe whatever you want because you have free will.
I’ve said these things before, and I’ll say them again: life cannot evolve until it exists, which means that before evolution even becomes theoretically possible, creation has already occurred. Before you can even get to the point where you even have an Old World ape capable of “evolving” by sexual reproduction into a modern human being, at least two creation events have already occurred: the origin of the universe and the origin of life. There are probabilities associated with the origin of the universe and the origin of life that are extraordinarily low, slighter greater than zero. There would be yet another probability to calculate representing the odds for the evolution of apes to humans, but the problem is the odds of an ape evolving from a human by random chance cannot be any greater than the odds of the universe being created from nothing, or life being created from inanimate matter because the human requires the universe and life to exist in order to possibly evolve.
Know this: if you believe in evolution, Time has become your god.
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