Not a Chimp
Look, every time scientists report another significant fossil find, the fundamentalists who spend their life monitoring the progressive blogs go ape yet again. They trot out the same tired old bits of nonsense, dittoed from some ill-educated fundamentalist preacher.

‘My grandmother wasn’t a monkey’ (or a chimp, if they are a sophisticated fundy) they cry. Anyway ‘monkeys are still around, so that proves evolution didn’t happen’. And ‘where are the missing links?’

I don’t know how many times we have to say these things, nor how may times they have been said since Thomas Huxley first debated evolution with Bishop Wilberforce in the nineteenth century (yes, that’s right, this creationism nonsense with all its non-evidence, was first roundly defeated well over 100 years ago. It isn’t shiny new, it’s old stuff), but let’s try it again.

First, and you should be sitting down for this, no one ever said you were descended from chimps, let alone monkeys, although you are descended from primeval slime, but that’s a story for another day. Chimps and orangutans and gorillas are kind of cousins (all of us being descended from a common ancestor some millions of years ago) to humans, not ancestors. That is why they are still around, just like your own cousin relatives are still around, though your great grandparents probably aren’t. There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

That common ancestor had some human features, some chimp and so on, and we know this partly because our DNA is so similar, and partly because of ‘missing links’. There are really though no ‘missing links’ any more, in fact there are so many links now known that the evolutionary tree is being described in finer and finer detail every year. Astonishing really when the chances of an individual animal being fossilised in the first place, the fossil surviving and then being found, are tiny. Another couple just the other day, one adding more information about the early humans and their links to the other great apes, the other adding more information about the first fish to evolve terrestrial capabilities. But the broad links were known long ago, and fossils found which illustrated them, all we are now doing is adding detail.

So next time there is an evolution news item, let’s try for a bit more sophistication in the responses eh. Give us a challenge — find some fossils that don’t relate to all other known species in some way — don’t fit into the evolutionary framework carefully worked out over some 200 years now, or find some hole in the mechanism of natural selection which drives evolution. But don’t trot out the tired old rubbish about apes as grandparents that Bishop Wilberforce should have been embarrassed by in 1860.