Homo sapiens didn't descend from apes; apes and homo sapiens share a common ancestor. It's nit-picky, but it's the kind of sloppy locution that allows the uninformed to make stupid statements in favor of young earth creationism and intelligent design.

Saying that homo sapiens descended from present-day apes is akin to saying that you descended from your contemporary distant relative (say, a fifth cousin). Your cousin didn't beget you; you and your cousin have a common ancestor several generations back.

My own personal tic; didn't mean to derail the thread. I feel like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

Because that's precisely the kind of explanation that's needed to counter the Creationist meme that if we're descended from apes, then why are there still apes in the world.

And the other one, if we're descended from apes, how come we're not seeing evolution in action today (ape to human).

You know, based on cladistics we see in early hominid fossils. Even in hominids that biologists agree fall into the human lineage we would describe as apes with the ability to walk in a bipedal manner.

Of course this is open to interpretation.

Which is why I mentioned "present-day apes" in my nit-picky post. When we use imprecise language, it leads to imprecise thinking, and our tendency to compress events that took place over a very long time is magnified.

Yeah, my mother should have had me tested.

We *are* apes. Gorillas, chimps and orangutans are apes as well. And our most recent common ancestor was an ape.

And of the four primary great ape species (human, gorilla, chimp, orangutan), the two who are most closely related to each other are human and chimp.

Or they were really fond of oranges?

The true and original purpose of the navel was as a receptacle of lint.

It was only later that the Lord used the navel for a dual purpose.

The workings of the Lord are manifold, strange and mysterious.

What's the problem here?