From the Bench
ROLL OVER, MOSES, HERE THEY COME AGAIN
Earlier this week, reporter Mike Toner of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution disclosed a disturbing report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A geneticist at Wayne State University says that on the proverbial “tree of life” mankind may be joined on the same limb with the chimpanzee.
This is very disturbing to those of us who are still wrestling with the heresy of Darwin. It is bad enough to think we share the same tree, much less the same branch; nevertheless, the meddlesome scientists who are examining, splitting, cloning, and mapping the human genome report a 99.4 percent match between humans and chimpanzees.
Even Johnnie Cochran would have trouble beating those odds.
I don’t know who should be more distressed by the close kinship, us or the chimps.
For example, consider my Uncle Ed. At the age of seven, he swung out on a grapevine over a ravine, turned loose, and dropped twenty feet. His sister (my Mama) insisted that the vine broke, and that Ed was never “quite right” after that. Her older brother, Fred, was just as adamant that Ed was not “quite right” before the incident, and deliberately turned loose.
In any event, Uncle Ed was not “quite right” when I knew him, and any chimpanzee of even average intelligence would not drop from a tree before locating something else to grab on the way down. I doubt that he would be clamoring to share his limb with Uncle Ed.
Taking a wider perspective of the man/chimpanzee comparison, how many overweight chimps have you seen lately? Do chimps have MTV? Do they conduct political campaigns and hold elections? Or go halfway around the world to kill each other?
Closer to home, and on a more personal note, do boy chimps suffer from erectile dysfunction? If so, at least they are discrete enough not to make TV commercials and send out emails to talk about it.
All in all, I think the chimps have more reason to be disturbed by this latest disclosure than we do.
Yet there will be those who walk upright and allegedly talk the same who will be terribly upset by this new evidence of man/monkey relationship. It will be almost as earthshaking to some of “the cloth” as Galileo’s assertion several hundred years ago that the earth moves.
Hopefully, those who place equal emphasis on Genesis and the Gospels will still be so busy getting the president re-elected or re-setting their watches for the end of time that they won’t notice this latest scientific attack on Moses and the elders.
Otherwise, monitor your TV closely and don’t let your pet chimp watch any TV preachers. If he listened very long, he might decide to leave home and find his own limb.