TODAY'S SCIENCE TRIVIA: To this day, the topic of human evolution remains hotly debated. Those who support the idea of natural selection typically find themselves in opposition to those who believe that humanity was purposely, intelligently designed by a higher power. In such arguments, these questions tend to be brought up to disprove evolution, worded in a way to make them appear irrefutable: "If humans did evolve from apes, then why are there still apes? Why haven't all apes turned into humans, and why haven't we found the so-called 'missing link'?" The problem with these seemingly well-constructed points, though, is that they hinge on two fundamentally wrong assumptions: That the evolutionary relationship between apes and humans is linear (it isn't), and that humans are somehow the pinnacle of evolution (we aren't).
There is no "missing link" between humans and apes, because humans didn't evolve from apes to begin with. In reality, hominids (a group that includes humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans) came from a common ancestor, one that is said to have lived in Africa approximately 6 to 7 million years ago. The fact that we share almost 99 percent of our genetic sequence with chimpanzees and bonobos supports this, as well as the countless fossils showing how our ancestors became more and more like the humans we are today.
