Not So Similar

To those of you who watched Sesame Street when you were young – like I did – do you remember the part of the show when they sang, “One of these things is not like the others...”? It was a little exercise where they would show 4 objects: 3 of them were similar and 1 was different. It wasn't a hard game, not even for a 5-year-old. Usually the difference was very obvious. They might show 3 squares and 1 circle, for example. In those games, the most obvious answer was always the correct one.

As adults, we might have a tendency to over think the game. If you think about it, there are a number of ways we could compare the shapes. If 2 squares and the circle were blue, we could correctly say the red square was different. Perhaps I might compare the area of the different shapes and see that 3 are more similar in size than the other. If I examined them microscopically, I might discover that 3 were drawn clockwise and 1 was drawn counterclockwise. The more minutia I examine, the more ways I might find to compare and contrast the different shapes. At the same time, though, the more I might loose sight of the most glaring difference: 3 are still squares and 1 is a circle!

A few posts back, I mentioned that chimps are similar to humans. Evolutionists claim that the similarities are due to relatedness between humans and chimps. As we study chimps, we might write a long list of things we have in common. But I think that, in their zeal to see the similarities between humans and chimps, scientists have lost sight of the glaring differences between the two.

I took my son to the zoo recently. In the gorilla area, there was actually an exhibit that encouraged kids to compare themselves to gorillas. As far as I'm concerned, the more we compare humans and apes, the greater the differences that we can see. Human feet do not even remotely resemble apes' feet. Even our hands are dissimilar. The proportion of our limbs to our bodies is different than in gorillas. Our hips, our knees, our faces, our skulls, etc. - they're all different. Do I really need to list all the differences? This is a game played by first graders, after all, and the differences are just as easy to spot now as they were on Sesame Street.

And what about intelligence? I have to laugh when I see scientists marvel at a chimp using a stick as a tool – all they while they are recording the event in high-def video! It's easy to see who is the greater master of tools. Remind me again what scientists hope to learn from studying chimps.

Are there any similarities at all between humans and apes? Of course there are. I think in some cases the similarities are exaggerated. In the case of human/chimp DNA, for example, scientists have long claimed that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar. In more recent years, though, many have backed off that claim. It's more like 95%. But even if the 98% is accurate, the human genome is so enormous that even a 2% difference represents tens of millions of different base pairs. The enormous difference 2% makes in the host organisms is plain to see. If not exaggerated, the similarity in DNA is, at the very least, overrated.

And besides the obvious anatomical differences between apes an humans, there is also a spiritual difference. Of the various creatures in all the creation, only man is made in the image of God. On the day Adam was created, God gave him the task of naming certain animals (Genesis 2:19). The Bible makes it clear that Adam was not like any of the animals.

So the next time you hear an evolutionist calling chimps our closest cousin, remind yourself that chimps and humans are not really that similar. You can see the differences for yourself. Remember that simple little exercise you learned all the way back in the first grade and say to yourself, “One of these things is not like the others.”