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The evolution of primates is one of the best-documented processes in all of the historical sciences. Better than the evolution of land mammals to whales (and in the form of Ambulocetus natans we have a fossil screaming "transitional form!" so loud one's eardrums are shattered), better than even the organization of society in 3rd-millenium BC Egypt.

We KNOW where man and ape came from, to extremely high precision; we have literally millions of fossils all around the world, telling the same story in a remarkable convergence of evidence. We have genetic analyses, geological dating. We have hard, documented evidence of transitional forms ranging back from the present to over 4 million years ago. The existence of a common ancestor between Homo sapiens and (e.g.) pan troglodytes is a FACT, as secure as the claim that King Tut was in his his teens when he died. (Both, by the way, are determined by analysis of ancient bones.) I won't bore you with the details of exactly how this process happened and what species were created in the process, but the point is, we know it happened. It is a scientific fact.

This does not, in itself, presuppose any particular theory of that evolution, and it could be that Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics are wrong. To be honest, I doubt it; they are among the most accurate and powerful theories in the history of science, and if we can't trust them, I'm not sure we can trust aerodynamics enough to fly in airplanes. But that we share a common ancestor with apes? That's been known since the 1840's, and no serious scientist would doubt that it is an established fact in the bedrock of modern biology.

Learn more about this author, Patrick Julius.
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