Chimps: One more Nail in Creationism's Coffin

[The Lorax]

I'm not a young Earth creationist, but how exactly is this supposed to nail them?

[sweetycakes]

This finding is not new. It has been known for years that chimps, and even other animals, use 'tools' for feeding.

I suppose that even using their God-given body parts (such as teeth, paws, etc), could be classed as using 'tools'.

Anyway.....when you claim that this is 'one more nail' in the coffin of the creationists......I presume you mean that it is 'one more nail' in the coffin of the Creator...?

But you will be in your coffin infinitely sooner than He is.

[Trusting Jesus]

So, I guess what you are saying is that a million-billion years ago, chimps evolved up to man.....and now they are doing it again! Amazing. Unbelievable. When I say unbelievable, I mean unbelievable. Animals have intelligence. Just because a chimp figured out how to stab a bushbaby, so what? They have been sticking twigs in ant mounds for years. This isn't evolution...no nails, no coffin.

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Nathele

[patricia1]

most animals will use weapons, mammals and the ocean creatures...does not prove anything. They also will kill their own.

[Carryme]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...22201007_2.html

For First Time, Chimps Seen Making Weapons for Hunting

"Such claims are getting old," he said. "With the present pace of discovery, they last a few decades at most."

This is an interesting article, but I don't believe it proves or disproves anything. Let me start out by saying that if I were to be put in a category, it would be that of "young earth creationist". I realize that this makes me stupid in the eyes of many, but as a Christian I'm used to it, because the cross is foolishness to those that are perishing. I would love to quote a lot of scientific jargon for why I take the Bible more literally (though I am in no way oppossed to or think lowly of those who believe in an extended version of creation) but it just isn't there. The reason I believe is simply because of how strongly the Bible was revealled to me to be accurate and true. Paul, Peter, James, John and Jude became more than trusted allies when I started to listen to them, and realized that their insight into the "psychology" of men was far beyond anything that should have been available at the time. They didn't glean their understanding from Freud or Jung or anyone else. It was rather obvious that they gleaned it in repentance, which is turning to God, or the Creator, and understanding his design, whether it be for intimacy or what have you. In this, the apostles also understood the counter affects of using something outside of God's design, which is what sin is at its most base level. Because of the fact that I was faced with just how powerful the Bible was when I really turned back to it, without the tainting of the wisdom of man, I am very reluctant to water it down in any category, including creation.

I do believe that all real or true wisdom has its root in turning to God, and understand His design, but of course there will always be interesting questions. For me, if I picture the beginings of creation, it doesn't really matter if I see it as God verbally ordering man to rise from the dust, or whether I invision Him reaching down and taking a pinch of dust in his hands and slowly releasing it into the shape of a man as He raises His hand from the earth, the result will be the same when we look back. It will still look like it must have taken a very long time based on our paradigm of how long things take. But repentance, or turning to God, is the truest of all paradigm shifts, because it is to turn away from the observable to have faith in the interaction of the unobservable. Within my own paradigm shift then, some other interesting questions arise:

1) How did an accidentally created single celled omimba know that it had to divide and multiply or face extinction before it even got started. Was it motivated by the yet to be evolved emotion of "fear", in that it feared the none-existance of the existance it wasn't yet aware of? Wouldn't it have had to be designed or instructed, like in the Bible, to multiply?

2) If what was being created (assuming creation for a moment) was carbon based life forms, wouldn't that involve using up the carbon in the environment as God interacted with His creation? If all these scientific measurements are not only based on carbon content in the atmsphere, but actually an assumption of consistant carbon content through all of time, wouldn't an initial depletion of carbon in a sudden creation knock all of those assumptions and measurements out of whack?

3) James tells us that the person who looks intently into the scriptures will see much more than the person who glances over it. For some reason the repetition or the urgency of "God created them male and female" always struck me, and I didn't know why. But then as I prayed about it, I realized that gender completly goes against all evolutionary theories. If single celled organisms without the ability to learn, had learned to self-procreate how or why would they ever get to the point of becoming dependant on another gender to do what they were already succesfully doing on their own? That would involve trust, and planning and recognition of potential and everything else. Monkies may know how to use sticks to get a meal, but I don't think that proves the ability to ask themselves where they want to be in the evoultionary process in five years, and yet evoultion asks us to blindly believe that billions of years before the monkey with a stick, the evolutionary process had the forsight to conquer doubts, and accept the vulnerability of an interactive and co-dependant relationship, as the best potential for the evolution that it wasn't even aware it was involved in yet. I'm sorry, but seeing as five year plans are fairly recent, I'm scepticle of the proposed super intelligance of accidental creation to have a 5 billion year plan.

Carryme

[redwing]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...22201007_2.html

For First Time, Chimps Seen Making Weapons for Hunting

In a typical sequence, the animal first discovered a deep tree hollow suitable for bush babies, which are nocturnal and weigh about half a pound. Then the chimp would break off a branch -- on average about two feet long, but up to twice that length -- trim it, sharpen it with its teeth, and poke it repeatedly into the hollow at a rate of about one or two jabs per second.

After every few jabs, the chimpanzee would sniff or lick the branch's tip, as though testing to see if it had caught anything.

In only one of the 22 observations did a chimp get a bush baby. But that is reasonably efficient, Pruetz said, compared with standard chimpanzee hunting, which involves chasing a monkey or other prey, grabbing it by the tail and slamming its head against the ground.

In the successful bush-baby case, the chimpanzee, after using its sharpened stick, jumped on the hollow branch in the tree until it broke, exposing the limp bush baby, which the chimp then extracted. Whether the animal was dead or alive at that point was unclear, but it did not move or make any sound.

Chimpanzees are believed to offer a window on early human behavior, and many researchers have hoped that the animals -- humans' closest genetic cousins -- might reveal something about the earliest use of wooden tools.

Many suspect that the use of wooden tools far predates the use of stone tools -- remnants of which have been found dating from 2 1/2 million years ago. But because wood does not preserve well, the most ancient wooden spears ever found are only about 400,000 years old, leaving open the question of when such tools first came into use.

The discovery that some chimps today make wooden weapons supports the idea that early humans did too -- perhaps as much as 5 million years ago -- Stanford said.

Adrienne Zihlman, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the work supports other evidence that female chimps are more likely than males to use tools, are more proficient at it and are crucial to passing that cultural knowledge to others.

"Females are the teachers," Zihlman said, noting that juvenile chimps in Senegal were repeatedly seen watching their mothers make and hunt with spears.

Females "are efficient and innovative, they are problem solvers, they are curious," Zihlman said. And that makes sense, she added.

"They are pregnant or lactating or carrying a kid for most of their life," she said. "And they're supposed to be running around in the trees chasing prey?"

Frans B.M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said aggressive tool use is only the latest "uniquely human" behavior to be found to be less than unique.

"Such claims are getting old," he said. "With the present pace of discovery, they last a few decades at most."

[Gerioke]

I wonder why the monkey doesn't use the sharpened stick on the animal he has to chase down and bash it's head.

He would expend much less energy stabbing his victim than lifting it and bashing it's head into the ground., better yet, he could use it as a spear and conserve more energy, by not having to chase his victims.

Oh well, I'm sure they will figure it out eventually.

Why doesn't the monkey just go on welfare?

[Carryme]

Cache,

I

[Carryme]

Cache,

Your willingness to consider and your desire to make amends is enough for now, and I appreciate it. I will say however, that if you spoke philosophically and deeply from the heart to somebody about what you believed, and they in turn showed little effort to understand it, even going to the degree of creating a visual image of rolling on the floor in laughter, it probably wouldn

[Carryme]

Cache,

I truly do appreciate your response. It is very encouraging, and goes a long way in supporting my conviction that we have reached a healthier level of communication.

One lesson I have had repeated to me many times through the course of my life (I can be a little thick, so I often need more than one lesson!) is that often what I am trying to get others to see at a deeper level, is also something I need to look at a little closer in my own life. When I was faced with how your humour impacted me, I was also faced with the realization that my sense of humour can actually be insensitively used as a caustic weapon. I don