I have a couple of relatives who aren't as smart as chimps !! :)

I am amazed at the shortsightedness of opponents of evolution who fixate on the supposed humiliation of descending from Apes.

That's hardly the beginning! We descended from rat-like lemur-like proto-primates, worms, and protozoa! If the trail of evolution ended at the Ape, it would be simply be a more complex version of creationism.

Ben

I prefer chimps to humans who practice certain socially backward religions. I don't mind descending from those cheeky monkeys either. But the human mind is no accident, even one like mine.

There are no accidents in evolution. There are unplaned changes which are either favored or selected against but "accident" is a human term - a value given to an event.

Evolution should be looked at as a computational process; a combination of trial and error with a long memory.

Personally I find the idea that God and evolution are incompatable to be pointless. It is sort of like being forced to accept either the scientific explanation of baking being a process of heat, yeast, carbon dioxide, etc, or that bread is created by a Baker.

If one argues that one cannot have both evolution and God, it seems to me that one is placing arbitrary restrictions on the abilities of God.

I'm also a bit curious why scientific explanations of other creation events does not attract this heat. How come the creationists never try to prove that gravity, accretion, dust, etc are not elements of star and planet formation?

Ben

the Quran says that Jews are descended from apes and pigs. Pickthall's translation of the Quran [Koran: An Interpretation] has an index to look up the several places referring to Jews as descended from apes and pigs.