Quoting a bit more from the article:

> Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals, a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis.

Genesis 1 indeed puts humans last, but Genesis 2 puts them first. And Genesis 2 is the older story of the two. Maybe that explains why it's more in line with those folk zoologists? Genesis 1 (a poem, structured by the days of the week) was written later, possibly during the Babylonian exile, and may be more informed by the science of the Babylonians; it addresses not just the creation of the Earth and the creatures on it, but also the sun and stars, and the passage of time; topics that the Babylonians were very interested in.

And then Cain says to God: "I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me." And God responds: "Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over." And God "put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him." (Genesis 4, 14-15)

But who are they? (whoever, anyone, no one) At this point in the story there should only be three people on earth: Adam, Eve and Cain. And in the following verse it says that "Cain made love to his wife".

Where does she come from?

One possible explanation is that the story of creation talks about one specific tribe, among other tribes that would pre-exist to the family of Adam, or at least co-exist.

Which is kind of relevant to the debate of different species of humans.

The fact that according to Genesis 4 other people did exist is a very good but in my opinion completely different issue.

Although it's certainly true that Genesis 3 suggests thorns, thistles and other nastier parts of nature weren't around at first, which again fits the "man came first" aspect of the Genesis 2 creation story.

However, it is also important to recognize that they were brought together and redacted by an editor (or committee of editors, perhaps even spread out over time) that arranged and tweaked the stories. At the very least, it is easy to glean from the text that they are intended to form a whole "collection," with connections between the various myths. The textual evidence suggests that the connections are stronger than that.

So while it is the more common error to underappreciate the differences between the accounts, it is a less common but equally erroneous mistake to underappreciate the "unity" (of a sort) that they have.

If we assume harmony between Genesis 1:11-13 (fruits/grains) and Genesis 2:5 (bush/plants of the field) then it is clear that fruit was the chief food in the garden and agriculture came later.

If one of them was not correct nobody would have put them in the same bible.

Focusing on "correct" is the wrong approach to reading these old mythological parts of the Bible. People put these stories in the Bible because of their story and meaning, not because of any kind of historical correctness. (Because how could they know?)

As if anyone is claiming we're derived from modern chimps...

Meanwhile the ancient apes that we share as common ancestors with modern apes are long extinct.

Not to mention evolution doesn't require an extinction as far as I know. See polar bears

The only person I've ever met in my life who did not believe in evolution was a catholic priest. It's honestly bewildering to me that evolutionary sceptics are common enough to warrant a note in mainstream media or even just normal conversation. To me it's comparable to finding out there are still geocentrism apologists.

Although from what I've read it's more common in US. I'm in Europe so that may be the source of my bubble.

(1) But there is an important provision to be considered by the faithful: the teaching of evolution cannot patently claim that there is no God. It is outside the scope of any science to disprove (or prove) the existence of God. And thus it is a misrepresentation of the science for any of the faithful to claim otherwise. The Church respects science in its endeavor to sincerely discover truth; Pope John Paul II once put it as such in his writings (I am paraphrasing here): "Faith forms reason, reason informs faith."

(2) Darwin's work was in fact not motivated by a sense of atheism [1]. In fact, I believe that I once discovered that in the Forward to On the Origin of Species, he references God in a positive note. The exact comment escapes me--perhaps someone with the actual text can verify this.

[1] https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-12041.xml

One day the professor came in and very sternly told us something along the lines of "If you disagree with this and you want to walk out, that's fine - remember, you're the ones paying to be here, and you're adults and that's your choice. But I'd like to re-emphasis the 'you're adults' part - it is unacceptable for me to be receiving angry letters from your parents. If you don't pass this class because you walk out, that's on you and you need to own that consequence." ~ oof, it was a rough Monday.

Gregor Johann Mendel - father of modern genetics and Catholic friar.

Source: I'm Catholic today.

Specifically, from what I've read, they're likely to be much more prevalent in the US Bible Belt and other places with strong concentrations of evangelical fundamentalists, because despite Catholicism being extremely different doctrinally, the actual Catholics in that area are almost invariably going to be more influenced by the culture around them, including the attitude toward religion and science.

And that's very much the case. Formal Church documents confirm the belief, and the very large majority of Catholics believe it. There isn't anything contradictory in believing evolution may have been the means by which God created people.

Whether that was the case when or where anyone else was growing up, I can't attest. I'm only speaking to the commonality of the belief in the present.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/06/how-highly-...

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/12/30/publics-view...

Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution. Evangelicals tend to express the opinion that humans have existed in the same form forever.

As for evolution, the Christians literally believe man was made whole, along with every other living thing - a more sci-fi explanation would be massive viral and bacterial mutation, like a lichen growing legs and arms (bacteria and viruses both evolve at breathtaking speeds, so it is possible if unlikely).

Creationists do actually acknowledge evolution, they usually downplay its significance or spend a lot of time pointing the current scientific inconsistencies in mainstream evolutionary theories.

I think they are both a bit wrong - obviously Creationism is wildly optimistic about both an all powerful entity who creates things then mysteriously vanishes, never to be heard from again (discounting the delusions or child-exploitation of near death "I met god" accounts). There is a wide amount of expression our genes already afford us - it only takes a couple generations for most animals or plants to express very different visible traits. Couple that with invasive viral infections permanently mutating the gonad materials (eggs, sperm, spores) and wild environmental fluctuations (meteors hitting the ocean), you could experience evolutionary forces in a very short time frame. I don't know that you require billions or trillions of years in the margins of carbon dating.

Ignoring questions of whether the astrophysicists have it right with the age of the known universe (is the big bang truly the beginning of the universe or just an event in a multidimensional cosmos?), a middle ground where the evolutionists and Christians are both wrong seems more plausible to me - hominids have been around for a very, very long time, perhaps even coexisting hundreds or billions of years ago with dinosaurs. We just happen to exist post some set of climactic events, cutting us off from our history.

I should clarify - I am not pro Creationism, I used to appreciate having been taught a different theory, however apologist doesn't make for good science, especially when the mainstream theories have the easy out of calling anything else "Christian nonsense". E.g. in physics there is the standard model, and various competing alternative models, crucially there are no major appeals to authority and so competing theories can thrive. Evolution is almost political on the other hand, much the same as climate science.

I guess we had Christian physics, we called that witchcraft. Ironically, with some of the immoral things modern tech has enabled, perhaps the claims of beezlebub in your tech weren't off the mark wholly. They are plenty of angels in tech though too...

The common ancestor between us and bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs is still around. They're just bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangs and humans nowadays because some populations simply matched their environments over a (long) time and became more fit in their niche.

The question what constitutes a species, for sake of our classification desires, is also very relevant to this. Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Why do some of us have Neanderthal genes?

Generally, but then you have things like multiple canids being different species but able to produce viable hybrids (e.g. the large number of coywolves we have near me). Since "species" is a classification we made up which doesn't map to reality particularly well, it gets pretty fuzzy at the edges.

The latter might be too clever for their own good however, having invented carbon-fueled industry, super-powered AI, and various hyper-destructive weapons. Also Twitter. And NFTs.

Like thinking a "culture" that some people have labelled/categorized as "hunter gatherer" therefore somehow is "less developed" or even has "less history" than other social groupings, and reveals the way humans were a long time ago -- whereas in fact any human culture on the planet at the same time has the same amount of history and development behind them.

Some of this is covered in Graeber and Wengrow's recent _The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity_.

We really want to impute a direction to changes over time (whether biological or social); to think that the changes always go in the same direction; that it's a direction of "better"; that the things we currently value as 'better' are that directional 'better'; and that therefore anything we think is 'not as good' is somehow "earlier" or "less developed". None of those are accurate ways to understand actual historical changes over time, whether biological/evolutionary or social or anything else really.

But if you want to deconstruct the argument fully, evolution actually isn't really anything at all - shifting genes in a shifting environment.

Like a rock rolling down a hill, bouncing off of other rocks.

It's not even a 'process' and it probably should be called:

'Species Drift' or something like that.

And taken even further - you and I are just 'lumps of material bouncing around'.

The term 'intelligence' has no scientific meaning either.

How can a bag of random particles be 'intelligent' or 'create'?

You're not 'reading' this, you're randomly bouncing through the universe. It just seems like you are 'doing' something.

But you're not 'doing' anything more than the chair you are sitting on. It's there, you are there. You both got there the same way.

But the matter of fact is, we do have metaphysical foundations:

Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human 'Kindgoms' in which we believe that the 'Human' condition is more evolved, at very least Han the 'Mineral' and likely 'Vegetable'.

We basically take that, and the presence of life as 'matter of fact' and a kind reality.

It just doesn't jive well with Scientific Materialism.

And if we do accept those basic principles, well, we are 'pretty much 'more' evolved than chimps', even though technically I do understand it's also reasonable to just say 'we are siblings with common ancestors' and that's that.

So on what basis are you saying it makes sense to say humans have had "more" evolution than chimpanzees? What does it mean for one species to have "undergone more evolution" than another, if both have the same amount of evolutionary history?

Just on the basis that you believe the result of that evolution for humans is an organism you consider more sophisticated? That is, I'd think, dependent on the assumption that evolution always leads in the direction you consider "more sophisticated", and, I guess, that it takes so much evolution to get so much sophictiation so something that is "more sophisticated" just must be "more evolved". That is also not true.

You can make a "metaphysical" value judgement that humans are more sophisticated, sure! I'm not trying to say that is inappropriate to do. But "evolved" is the wrong word for this, if you think it means the same thing we're talking about when we're talking about biological species evolution as formulated by Darwin etc.

The term 'evolved' I think can be used in English to describe something 'more advanced' by the crude and arbitrary manner in which we generally apply it.

Maybe in a Scientific context it wouldn't be correct, I admit that.

Yes, the word "evolved" can be used in a non-scientific way that has nothing to do with the origin of species or natural selection or genetic change over time too. I don't know if this the cause of our confusion, or that it's the result of our confusion, because so many of us, since Darwin, have had these assumptions that "evolution" functions teleologically and in a certain direction at a certain rate.

So that leads the wrong idea that, as codeflo points out, "evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last" over chimpanzees, or humans undergone "more evolution" than chimpanzeees.

When we understand the biological process of evolution more clearly, we can understand the natural world and the species in it and the relation between them more clearly.

To be more evolved, means to be more changed from the source. It means specialization for a specific scenario. Often "more evolved" can be "worse" once the environment changes, and that specialization becomes a disadvantage instead of an advantage. Or that a change brings one benefit but another potentially larger pitfall in the long run.

The amount of evolution should be measured in iteration cycles, how much change over how much time. It's also possible that something iterated many many times quickly long in the past and then stopped, vs something that just started making changes more recently.

Who said that? There are tons of newer than us leafs (organisms that evolved after we did).

If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.

With 'last' parent meant 'last with respect to that order', not necessarily in the sense of 'older' and 'newer' (which correlates with this order, as you pointed out).

I meant leaf nodes in the sense of the tree data structure, so I think we are saying exactly the same thing.

> If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.

Yes that's exactly what I meant with the second part of my comment.

I was with you until that statement. The concept of "importance" itself is also something we ourselves consider ie. you're not a monkey therefore you don't know if importance is even a thing for a monkey, or if it is and that it appears that they prefer bananas over AK 47's you're still not a monkey so you won't be able to be sure.

Therefore to attribute having the same concept of importance as us to another species is absurd.

"Black Monolith"

I will email you royalty checks next week.

What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God.

If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?

I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.

Well, they don't seen to have that great of a civilization

The ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking peoples "barbarians", suggesting they are uncivilised, primitive. To this day, the name of Germany in Polish means "those-who-cannot-speak".

I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains.

Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.

To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)

And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.

Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.

(Good point though.)