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We're often told that chimps and humans are 98% similar, but I've also read the more recent estimation is 95%. Either way, are scientists today in any way close to explaining how natural selection acting on random mutation created the vast differences between chimps and humans?
In the absence of such an explanation for our vast differences with chimps, why can't a reasonable person conclude that similarities between our species are the result of common design, rather than common descent?
Not everyone skeptical of Darwinian evolution believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old and the Flintstones was a true story. Christian geologists discovered earth’s antiquity before Darwin was even born:
Can we now provide a DNA-based answer to the fascinating and fundamental question, "What makes us human?" Not at all! Comparison of the human and chimpanzee genomes has not yet offered any major insights into the genetic elements that underlie bipedal locomotion, a big brain, linguistic abilities, elaborated abstract thought, or any other unique aspect of the human phenome.
Thoughts on the future of great ape research - Document - Gale Academic OneFile
But those hoping for an immediate answer to the question of human uniqueness will be disappointed. "We cannot see in this why we are phenotypically so different from the chimps," says Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, a co-author on one Nature paper and leader of a study in Science comparing gene expression in chimps and humans (see www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1108296). "Part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don't understand it yet."
Chimp genome catalogs differences with humans - Document - Gale OneFile: Health and Medicine
In the absence of such an explanation for our vast differences with chimps, why can't a reasonable person conclude that similarities between our species are the result of common design, rather than common descent?
Not everyone skeptical of Darwinian evolution believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old and the Flintstones was a true story. Christian geologists discovered earth’s antiquity before Darwin was even born:
From 1780 many Anglicans supported the rising science of geology and some of the most significant world geologists before Darwin were Anglican clergy like Adam Sedgwick, William Buckland and William Conybeare. In the period 1800 to 1855, over 80% of Anglican clergy accepted geology (an approximate figure from my reading as many writers as possible). A small and vociferous minority did oppose geology; for example the Revd Henry Cole calling the evangelical Sedgwick an ‘infidel scoffer’. However, these devout anti-geologists were savaged by clerical-geologists like Sedgwick and disappeared by 1855 only to re-appear, Phoenix-like, in the 1980s.
The reaction to Darwin was varied. Some happily accepted evolution: Frederick Temple, R. W. Church, Hort (but Westcott was wary), Baden Powell, Liddon, Pusey (just!), Symonds and two evangelicals – H. B. Tristram of Durham and Prof C Babbington of Cambridge. Within decades most thinking Anglicans had accepted evolution but often insisted on the direct creation of humans. Some Anglicans opposed evolution, archetypically Samuel Wilberforce, but all opponents accepted geological time. Some of the main opposition to Darwin came from physicists and geologists.
Charles Darwin: a Fulcrum Appreciation | Fulcrum Anglican
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