More of the best things ever said in favor of human evolution

"Brookfield, Ill. -- A toddler fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo Friday afternoon... A 7-year-old female gorilla with a baby gorilla on her back, picked up the child, cradled him in her arms, and placed him near a door where zoo keepers could retrieve the boy."

ASSOCIATED PRESS NEWS STORY, AUGUST 16, 1996

"I saw one female chimpanzee, newly arrived in a group, hurry up to a big male and hold her hand towards him. Almost regally he reached out, clasped her hand in his, drew it towards him, and kissed it with his lips."

JANE GOODALL, IN THE SHADOW OF MAN

"I handed him the cigarette packet. He opened it, took out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. He then reached out his hand again and I gave him the matches; to my astonishment he took one out of the box, struck it, lit the cigarette, and threw the box down on the table."

GERALD DURRELL, THE NEW NOAH, 1972

"Anyone watching our Cameroons chimpanzee, Missie, sitting at table in her salon, pouring out three cups of coffee one after the other, and then smoking a cigarette, having lighted it herself, must have had an uncontrollable urge to laugh. But she also gave food for thought."

LUDWIG HECK, BOBBY THE CHIMPANZEE AND OTHER FRIENDS, 1931

"In one of the American monkey stations a completely tame and highly `civilized' chimpanzee named JoJo always switched the light off itself before settling down to sleep."

HERMANN DEMBECK, WILLINGLY TO SCHOOL, 1970

"Chimps (which have the same sleep stages as we do and even seem to dream in almost the same cycles), sleep about 8 hours."

HANSON & MORRISON, OF KINKAJOUS, CAPYBARAS, HORNED BEETLES, SELADANGS...

"The chimpanzee possesses a certain sense of humor...When the animal has succeeded in overturning a pail of water and caused a great deal of this, often including the pail, to descend upon the head of some poor unfortunate human attendant, it will clap both its hands over the top of its own head and emit a succession of loud, explosive noises from its larynx."

R. H. SMYTH, HOW ANIMALS TALK, 1959

"Mountain gorillas become killers when their social groups come face-to-face...One gorilla group will deliberately seek out another and provoke a conflict...An enormous male left a skirmish with his flesh so badly ripped that the head of an arm bone and numerous ligaments stuck out through the broken skin. Another left the battle scene with eight massive wounds where the enemy had bitten him on the head and arms. The site where the conflict had raged was covered with blood...Fossey actually recovered gorilla skulls with canine cusps from other gorillas still embedded in the skull's crest."

HOWARD BLOOM, THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE: A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY

"The males from the larger band of chimpanzees began to make trips south to the patch of land occupied by the splinter unit. The marauders' purpose was simple: to harass and ultimately kill the separatists. They beat their former friends mercilessly, breaking bones, opening massive wounds, and leaving the resultant cripples to die a slow and lingering death. When the raids were over, five males and one elderly female had been murdered. The separatist group had been destroyed; and its sexual active females and part of its territory had been annexed by the males of the band from the home turf."

HOWARD BLOOM, THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE: A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY

"The happy-go-lucky chimpanzee has turned out to be the most lethal ape - an organized, cooperative warrior."

MICHAEL GHIGLIERI, "WAR AMONG THE CHIMPS," DISCOVER, NOV. 1987

"Darwin was wrong. Man's still an ape."

GENE KELLY

"They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States For teaching that man descended from the apes. They coulda settled that case without a fuss or a fight If they'd seen me chasing you, sugar, through the jungle last night."

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (FROM HIS SONG, "PART MAN, PART MONKEY" ON 57 CHANNELS, RECORD# 38T 38 74354)

"A recent film shown on the DISCOVER channel (Sept. 1996), showed bonobo chimpanzees engaged in long `tongue kissing' sessions - chimpanzees French kissing on national television! They also showed a male and female bonobo engaged in intercourse, face to face, in the `missionary position.' They are the only known species of primate besides man that performs sex in that position. All other chimp and gorilla species do it `doggie style.' It was also announced on the program, but now shown, that bonobos engage in oral sex and homosexual-like behaviors. Some scientists believe that bonobos are the species of chimpanzee most like man."

E. T. BABINSKI

"The folks who study DNA say there's very nearly as much `chimp' in our DNA as there is `man' in the chimp's DNA! Our DNA is 98% identical. Yet chimps don't complain that they're stuck with so much `man' in them, so why should creationists complain when evolutionists remind creationists that man is still in many ways an `animal?'"

E. T. BABINSKI

"1996 presidential contender, Pat Buchanan, said something along the lines of `You may believe that you're descended from monkeys, but I believe you're a creature of God.' I guess that Buchanan hadn't considered that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is that God is the Creator of everything, including `monkeys.' It seems to me that one of the basic reasons behind the so-called `creationism' is the feeling that somehow parts of God's creation are not worthy of being our ancestors."

TOM SCHARLE (scharle.1@nd.edu)

"Creationists ask, `How can man and chimpanzee be related if they don't have the same number of chromosomes?' (23 pairs in man, 24 in great apes). The answer is found in "The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy" by Jorge J. Yunis and Om Prakash (Science, Vol. 215, Mar. 19, 1982, p. 1525-1530). This paper has a picture of all the chromosomes of man, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans with each pair of chromosomes lined up next to each other and showing the 1000 band stage with all the sections labeled. Just by examining the picture you can clearly see that the chromosomes are remarkably similar. The differences are equally revealing as a vast majority are simple inversions of sections of chromosomes. Chromosome #2 of humans is shown next to two chimpanzee (and gorilla and orangutan) chromosomes since the human chromosome #2 is twice as long as the chimpanzee (and the other two as well), yet all the bands match up showing that the one less human chromosome is merely the result of two chimp chromosomes getting connected together!"

CLARK DORMAN (http://cns-web.bu.edu/pub/dorman/Dorman.html)

"Why are the chromosome numbers, lengths and banding patterns for humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, so similar? [See picture above.] A `Designer' who `separately created' all four species could just as easily (with the aid of His omniscience) have stored the DNA information for the production of each species in very different numbers, lengths, and banding patterns of chromosomes.

"The evolutionary explanation is that the numbers, lengths and banding patterns of the chromosomes of these species were simply inherited from common ancestors."

E. T. BABINSKI

"Is it possible for humans and chimpanzees to inter-breed? Utilizing modern tricks of the trade geneticists in England have cross-bred a goat and a sheep. They call it a `geep.' In the case of trying to cross man with chimp some say that genetic engineering may not be necessary, normal insemination may suffice. By artificially inseminating a female chimp with human sperm (after numerous attempts), you might produce a fertilized egg (and, if it continues to develop without any major difficulties), an embryo, a fetus, or even a `chimpman,' or a `humanzee.' Geneticists point out that some species with greater genetic differences than man and chimp have produced hybrid offspring. Take the hybrid between a gibbon and a siamang, two species that differ more in chromosomal composition than do humans and chimps (Science 205:308). So it may be possible to produce a hybrid `human/chimp' even without the help of genetic engineers.

"Would such a creature be a `man' or an `animal' according to the strictly `either/or' definitions of `creation science?' Or, to put the matter more sharply, `If you could use genetic engineering to substitute the DNA sequences of a chimp with human DNA sequences, doing it one base-pair at a time, then at what base-pair substitution would the chimp cross over to being a `human being?'

"Fortunately for creationists, few of them have even thought about such questions. As for evolutionists, no scientist I know wants to risk seeing how he might be treated should he attempt such an experiment. Especially not after the `Christian Coalition,' or Muslim fundamentalists, rally their forces against him/her. Of course, once fertilization has occurred, the Christian Coalition would be faced with the dilemma of either urging that the fertilized cell be aborted, or letting it grow, and risk it being born. Could they allow a creature to be born which might provide living proof that man was not a `special kind' but that he could also interbreed with chimpanzees, his nearest genetic cousins? What a dilemma!"

E. T. BABINSKI

"I'd like to see some human females volunteer their eggs and wombs for insemination with bonobo chimpanzee sperm." - Michelle Steiner

"Wow! You'll do anything to get laid." - Alan "Uncle Al" Schwartz

"(Blush!)" - Michelle Steiner

DISCUSSION ON THE TALK.ORIGINS NEWSGROUP, OCT. 1996

"Hawaii consists of a string of `young' volcanic islands that are still being formed as tectonic plates pass slowly over volcanic activity on the Pacific sea floor. The volcanoes spew up new island-making material at the end of the Hawaiian island chain as the islands ride the tectonic plates and pass overhead. Thus, the string of islands known as `Hawaii' keeps growing. The first island that was formed in the chain has been measured to be about 5 million years old. The islands that form the rest of the chain are younger in a descending order from the first.

"Hawaii also contains over 800 species of Drosophila, or, "fruit flies." That's probably because when the first Hawaiian island formed, the fruit fly was one of the first flying insects to inhabit it, and the environment of the Hawaiian islands grew varied as the islands blossomed forth. On them you can find sunny beaches with strong winds, cool forest valleys, tropical rain forests, and mountainous terrain. So the flies had a wide range of niches they could inhabit with little or no competition. As new islands in the chain sprouted up, and grew distant from one another, that led to the isolation of flies on different islands where they could no longer interbreed but evolved different species in different habitats.

"The unusual and diverse species of fruit flies that are found only on the Hawaiian islands, obviously had to have evolved from a common stock, just as evolutionists claim that man and chimpanzee diverged from a common stock. And like the species of fruit flies that evolved in 5 million years on the Hawaiian islands, it was about 5 million years ago, according to evolutionary theory, that man and chimpanzee diverged, and the genetic distance between man and chimpanzee (about 2% of their DNA being different) is about the same as the genetic distance between some species of fruit flies on the Hawaiian islands. Thus, human evolution, like fruit fly evolution, is, as Pope John Paul II recently put it, `more than just a hypothesis.' And that's putting it mildly."

E. T. BABINSKI

"We have obtained estimates of genetic differentiation between humans and the great apes no greater than, say, those observed between morphologically indistinguishable (sibling) species of Drosophila flies (fruit flies)."

ELIZABETH J. BRUCE & FRANCISCO J. AYALA (DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA), "HUMANS AND APES ARE GENETICALLY VERY SIMILAR," NATURE, NOV. 16, 1978, VOL. 276, P. 265.

"There are more than a thousand different species of cichlid (pronounced SICK-lid) fishes in the world today. Some are bigger than goats; others could fit in a thimble. Some are thick and boxy; others lean and long. They are brown or turquoise or every shade of a neon rainbow painted on a single beast [with a host of different mouth adaptations for different feeding habits. - ED.]...In Lake Victoria in East Africa three hundred species of cichlids arose from one progenitor species in less than 200,000 years, an evolutionary pace that no other animal group has rivaled...One genetic study looked at the DNA of fourteen Lake Victoria cichlid species exhibiting highly divergent feeding behaviors...Yet despite the fishes' specialized appetites, their genes differ by only two or three base pairs, or chemical subunits, out of the many thousands that constitute the genes examined. There is more genetic variation among people than there are among these fourteen fish species - and people, keep in mind, are all members of the same species."

NATALIE ANGIER, "PLENTY OF FISH IN THE SEA" IN THE BEAUTY OF THE BEASTLY

"The genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees is so small, in fact, that it corresponds to that between sibling (closely allied) species and is less than between two nonsibling species of the same genus.

"It is also apparent that the malarial parasites of man and those of every one of the apes evolved from a common ancestor. This is an important point, as it indicates that their hosts, man and apes, did likewise."

J. RICHARD GREENWELL (SECRETARY TO THE ARID LANDS NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA), "TIPTOEING BEYOND DARWIN," SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, SPRING 1980, PP. 42-54

"The same retroviral DNA sequences appear in the same relative places in the DNA of both human beings and primates. And there isn't the faintest probability that such sequences could have been inserted on two separate occasions by two of the same species of retroviruses and wound up in the same relative places of the DNA of both man and primates. So, the Designer is either telling us that man and primates evolved from the same distant DNA stock into which a retrovirus inserted its DNA long ago - a stock that split afterwards into man and apes; or, the Designer is pulling a con game not unlike the one proposed by some creationists who argued that the Designer sculpted all the fossils - which merely mimicked the remains of once-living animals and plants - and filled the rocks with them to purposely deceive mankind into believing that such animals and plants had existed in the past."

E. T. BABINSKI [For information on retroviral sequences found in the same places in both human and primate DNA, see Bonner et al., 1982, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 79:4709; Mariani-Constantini et al., 1989, Journal of Virology 63:4982; Edward E. Max, letter published in Creation/Evolution, issue 27, summer 1990, pgs. 45-49]

"Why is it that whenever a paleontologist notes similarities between an australopithicine's fossil knee joint (or femur or foot) and modern man's bones, the creationists jump all over it and state with supreme conviction: `That femur or foot bone, belonged to a "fully human" being who lived right beside his so-called evilutionary ancestors!' It doesn't matter to such creationists that the pelvis, femur, and foot bones belonged to creatures that only grew to be three-and-a-half to four feet tall at maturity, or that the big toe of these ancient foot bones (as seen in ancient footprint tracks in volcanic ash dating back to the Australopithicine era), was splayed outward, and not exactly like that of `fully human' beings.

"Don't creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists found ape-like skulls with the `human leg and foot bones,' rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with `ape leg and foot bones?'

Come on, creationists, think about it! Did God hide the human skulls, only leaving behind leg and foot bones belonging to human midgets with misshapen feet, and mix such bones only with the skulls of ape-like creatures with larger cranial capacities than living apes? What a "kidder" the creationist's God must be.

Or maybe, just maybe, ape-like creatures existed in the past that walked erect, which freed their hands to perform actions guided by their larger-than-average ape brains? Hey, that sounds like evolution. Golly gee wiz."

E. T. BABINSKI

"The most obvious specialized features of the modern apes are their long arms and the `simian shelf,' a bridge of bone joining the two sides of the lower jaw directly behind the front teeth. The simian shelf strengthens the lower jaw, a function performed in modern man by the chin. The long arms, of course, are great for swinging through trees.

"These specializations are not primitive features but relatively recent developments. The Miocene apes discovered by Louis Leakey had relatively short arms and still had not developed a simian shelf, indicating with respect to these features that apes have been getting progressively less manlike over millions of years."

FIX, THE BONE HUNTERS (pg. 17)

"Creationists claim it would be impossible for a chimpanzee to ever produce the works of Shakespeare. But something like that has already happened and it only took about five million years, because chimp and man share a common ancestor, one of whose descendants grew up to be Shakespeare."

E. T. BABINSKI