Apes and Super-Apes

Our Sibling Rail Gun of Compassion, Shannon, passes along a question asked by one of her fifth-graders in all seriousness: "do you think that since humans evolved from apes, that one day apes will evolve into like super apes and take over the world?"

My first reaction is this: It seems highly unlikely to me, but on the other hand God can do whatever God wants to do. After all, the development of intelligent human life was also highly unlikely. We didn't appear until billions of years after the creation of the world, and after hundreds of millions of years of its domination by dinosaurs. What allowed us to follow in the footsteps of the dinosaurs was their being wiped out by a large meteor and the ensuing long-term darkening of the sun. Because dinosaurs were large and cold-blooded, they died off where small, warm-blooded mammals were able to survive.

Based on this example, I would suspect that if a species were to follow us as a widespread dominating species, it would probably have to be very different from us, since what could kill us off would most likely kill off the apes, too. So maybe we'd have another lizard phase. Or the dolphins might take over. Or the cockroaches might have the chance to profit from their resistance to radioactivity. It's hard to predict in advance. And the bottom line is that none of this will happen in our lifetimes, or for that matter the lifetime of the Statue of Liberty.

There are interesting theological questions behind the original one, though, that I'll look at in later posts:
1. Are humans the only animals with a divine destiny?
2. What does believing in evolution say about God?
3. Can we trust the Bible?
4. If there were super-apes, would the second amendment be useful to us? Or would Charleton Heston have to find another way to fight them?

P.S. Shannon--I suspect your 5th-grader is familiar with the Planet of the Apes already, whether or not they've actually seen it.