Cousinhood

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It is a fact, denied vociferously but unsuccessfully by creationists, that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. Of course, creationists of various ilks deny our close relationship with the chimpanzee in order to protect their illusion of Special Creation.

The problem for creationists, particularly for YECs, is that Genesis does make falsifiable physical claims that do stand disproven by science. Somewhere along the way, some creationist has comprehended enough science to realize this major problem and the era of Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies was ushered in. The fact is, YECs and proponents of intelligent [sick] design theory promulgate ignorance and falsehoods in support of what they mistakenly call "Truth".

Biological evolution generated us from a common ancestor that also gave rise to chimpanzees and bonobos. (This hominid timeline implies a linear evolution for hominids, whereas a pruned bush would be more accurate.) We share more than 98% of our DNA sequences with chimpanzees, indicating that our evolutionary lines diverged 7 to 5 million years ago. In general, the later the analysis, the more recent the esimated split. The ancestor of chimpanzees and bonobos are estimated to have split again between 0.89 and 0.86 million years ago, and the two common chimpanzee subspecies are estimated to have diverged about 0.46 million years ago.

Even though our advantages over our cousins result from a regulatory-gene-mutation that permitted development of a greater brain/body size ratio, biological mutation/reproductive selection did not "care" whether or not we were otherwise inherently vastly superior in rationality/morality.

We seem to have inherited from this common ancestor a nature that lies somewhere between aggressive chimpanzees and sex-obsessed, peaceful bonobos. Possibly chimpanzees and bonobos diverged from a midway-natured common ancestor. The environments in which chimps and bonobos now live are comparatively more challenging in the case of chimps, no doubt necessitating – and so selecting for – their aggressive behaviour.