By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
Claims by evolutionists that humans are little more than “naked apes,” “hairless apes,” or “only a monkey shaved,” imply that, due to natural selection, humans may have evolved from apes (or an ape-like ancestor), but are still largely apes.
Professor Jared Diamond claimed that humans share approximately 98 percent of their genetic material with chimpanzees, leading him to characterize humans as a third species of chimp. He argues that many aspects of human behavior are best understood as extensions of our ape heritage.
His central thesis is that the biological similarities between humans and apes are so great that our evolutionary past provides an explanation for why humans often behave in ways similar to those of apes.
Leading Primatologist Frans de Waal compares humans to what evolutionists believe are our two closest ape cousins: the aggressive chimpanzee and the peaceful, matriarchal bonobo.
Using these comparisons, de Waal argues that many aspects of human nature can be better understood by examining our similarities to the apes. The fact is, human behavior is beyond what is necessary to survive and reproduce, as evolution teaches.
Common human behaviors that are not only not necessary for survival, but can interfere with survival, include skydiving, bungee jumping, rock climbing, learning to walk on stilts, or riding a unicycle.
This is a topic that I have been interested in for some time. The field is usually termed overdesign, referring to mental skills that exist at levels well beyond that required for survival as evolution teaches.
Examples are unusual abilities and skills achieved by the human brain, such as math savants who can perform seemingly impossible feats — like finding the square root of 3,678,424 in seconds, which is 1917.92179194.
Other examples are persons with hyperthymesiac ability (also called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory — HSAM), the ability to remember almost every day of their life in detail, and the calendar calculators, which enable individuals to instantly state the day of the week for any given date, are good examples to illustrate the concept of overdesign.
A typical question that a calendar calculator can answer is “On what day of the week did June 3rd, 1925, fall on?” Answer: Wednesday.
Other examples include the general strength (or capacity) of most human body organs and structures, which is considered by many anatomists to be far beyond that which is normally required for survival.
Many examples exist. My favorite example was a 17-year-old girl in a flight over the Amazon on Christmas Eve 1971. Her plane was struck by lightning and broken apart. The girl, still seat-belted in her seat, fell two miles into the jungle and survived.
Another example is Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant who holds the Guinness World Record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. Her plane was blown up by a bomb planted by a terrorist.
She fell 6.3 miles on January 26, 1972, and, although she was severely injured, she survived and lived until the age of 66.
Within ten months of her fall, Vulović had regained the ability to walk, but limped for the rest of her life, due to her spine being permanently twisted. Vulović continued to fly regularly, adding that other passengers were surprised to see her on flights.
If blind and unguided evolution is true, the prevalence of behaviors that most people can achieve with practice, such as operating complex machines like computers or piloting the Concorde, which cruised at twice the speed of sound, is very difficult to explain by evolution.
Evolution teaches that 99 percent of our multimillion-year-long evolutionary journey involved both arboreal and terrestrial travel, by climbing or walking.
Humans can achieve what no monkey can, including painting a bear with such detail that when I first saw such a picture, I was sure it was a beautiful color photograph.
On one visit to the Toledo Art Museum, I noted a large picture of a modern city illustrated in enormous detail. It looked like a large color picture, but it was a painting. Young girls at the Olympic gymnastics competition, doing amazing triple flip acrobatics with grace and precision, amaze me.
If we were designed, then this behavior would be anticipated, but it raises a fundamental problem. There is no reason to conclude that a mind that evolved to survive in an African savanna would have a capacity level far beyond what most of us utilize in our daily lives.
I struggled with learning the German language, which was one of the requirements for my Ph.D., to the extent that I had to hire a personal language teacher. Then a friend of my mother’s, who was a war bride from Germany, worked with me.
By comparison, my coursework in advanced math was easy. When I was practicing my German, a friend decided he would learn German so he could help me learn the language. A few weeks later, he was reading, writing, and speaking what appeared to me as perfect German.
My son obtained a position as a professor in Norway. I asked him, “How can you teach students when you do not speak Norwegian?”
He said, “I will just have to learn the language.” In a few months, he was close enough to fluency in Norwegian to allow him to instruct college students in Norwegian. He added Norwegian to his knowledge of other languages, including Spanish.
In short, humans can achieve mental and physical feats that their putative evolutionary journey in some savanna in Africa, due to survival-of-the-fittest mutations, could not possibly have produced. Humans are far more than hairless apes, as claimed in many evolutionary books and articles.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. He has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com Bergman’s website is: https://crev.info/author/jbergman/