Evolution is not a religious issue. It isn’t. If you make it a religious issue by pitting your religion against science, your religion looses. Period. That’s not an atheistic science conspiracy, it’s just a predictable byproduct of mistaking for divine revelation, what are actually stories passed down from people living in the iron age. Maybe the authors of genesis were inspired by God, but they clearly weren’t taking shorthand.
Maybe God made us in his image, but he took 4.6 billion years to do it and by “his image” is probably meant something other than “an old guy up in the clouds”. God or no God, evolution is how we got to be what we are, and if that seems to contradict some of the stories in scripture, that’s okay. God may have inspired the scripture, but he MADE the world, and this is it, right here holding up all these fossils.
Still, evolution is a vast and fascinating field, and there are a few things that are understandably confusing to the layman. This question, though, shouldn’t be one of them.
Australia was colonized by the British. Why are there still British? Because Australia was a penile colony, and most of the Brits stayed home and worked on bits for what would one day become Monty Python. Get it? Notice how Australians have a new dialect that is quite distinct from their ancestors? And yet, the Queen’s English is alive and well. Get it now?
No? I know, I know, you weren’t paying attention. The dog is chewing on the table leg, and somebody called you a monkey’s uncle, and you just have one question: If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?
Because the apes that were living 6-8 million years ago didn’t all line up and march through the mouth of Vol (Star Trek reference) and come out human. There were thousands of these apes, you see. Tens of thousands, in fact, and lots of different groups and kinds—far more than today, partially because we weren’t around with our Land Rovers and our taste for bush-meat and penchant for taking away everything from everyone all the time except in church when we remember that the Big Man is watching. But I digress.
There were all these apes see, and some of them lived over there under those trees and they were just okay. And some of them lived yonder in the valley and they were cool with that. And a lot of them lived way over through the mountains and they don’t ever call or write. But this other group here, let’s call them the Skins, they kept rubbing elbows with those ugly bad-tempered dudes at the edge of the jungle who ate all the bananas, the Shirts.
The Shirts really stunk. No really, they smelled of bananas and Old Spice, and between you and me, they were bullies anyway. So the Skins, they started foraging out into the savanna a bit. Now, the African savanna was as dangerous then as it is today. They have lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Well, they have lions. And stuff. Lions loved eating them some Skins, but like every other mammal, lions have to chill through the heat of the day or they—oh what is the technical term? Oh yeah—die.
So the Skins did okay. They weren’t exactly sprinters, but if you keep following an animal through the heat of the day—keep making him run—eventually he’ll keel over (there are modern humans who still hunt this way today). This worked pretty well, though the hairier guys couldn’t take the heat. Those guys would pass out and get eaten, or they would go off and join the Shirts bowling league. After a while, no one with much fur was left among the Skins. Life on the savanna worked out pretty well, because it was getting hotter all the time and the savanna was getting larger and larger. Also, tracking prey and pacing yourself is not the easiest work. The groups with the best planning and tracking skills got more food and less, um, eaten. So, by the time the sea level dropped enough to create a pathway up into Europe and Asia, the Skins were much smarter and taller and faster and sweatier than the Shirts, who still got together Thursdays to shake down the bananas, and if anything were even bigger bullies than they had been.
“But,” I hear you asking, “if the Skins evolved from the Shirts, why were there still Shirts?”
Put down the bananas and pay attention will you? The Skins didn’t evolve from the Shirts, they both evolved alongside each other. After a while, none of the lady Shirts wanted to hang with those sweaty Skins, and the Skins hated the way the Shirts beat the crap out of them for showing off their times in the 200 meter sprint, so they just sort of left each other alone. They had become separate species—though not by much.
Migration and isolation are key parts of evolution. Forget about Gorillas and Chimps for a moment. Look at our more immediate ancestors. Homo erectus migrated out of Africa 1.8 million years ago, eventually migrating up into Europe and evolving (over more than a million years) into the Neanderthals. Meanwhile, the original population of H. erectus still existed in Africa, continuing to evolve into H. sapiens. When Sapiens migrated out of Africa 200,000 years ago, they out-competed Neanderthals and spread around the world. But Sapiens still existed in Africa–and still exist there today.
If that’s all too much to wrap your brain around, here are some simpler examples: Branches can grow from a tomato plant while the plant is still there sending off more branches in other directions. We humans bred domesticated corn from a bushy grass called teosinte, but teosinte still grows wild. Televangelists evolved from the Catholic scholars of medieval Europe, but there are still smart people in Europe. Okay, that’s not really an example; that’s cultural evolution.
There are still other apes (besides us) because we evolved alongside them, from the same ancestral stock as they come from. But we know for a fact that we evolved together.
And no, we did not descend from Monkeys. We descended from an ancestral population of early apes that lived 6-8 million years ago. Our last common ancestor with the monkeys was around 70 million years ago and wasn’t even a primate yet. I think they still wore tunics or something like that.