Are You “An Animal of No Significance”?

Are You _An Animal of No Significance__.001 (1)

If you were to open the pages of Yuval Noah Harari’s book titled Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which was a New York Times bestseller, you would meet the following claim before finishing the fifth page:

“Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother” (emp. added).

This quote comes in the first chapter, titled “An Animal of No Significance,” the thesis of which is that Homo sapiens represents just one of many stages in the development of apes. According to Harari, you and I are of no more significance than apes, and our grandmother was a chimpanzee. Notice the following points about Harari’s message:

  • Harari presupposes that it is possible for a non-human creature either to transform into a human creature or give birth to a human creature. And yet, such never has been observed. In fact, it would violate the natural laws God created if a non-human creature transformed into a human creature or gave birth to a human creature (Genesis 1:24).
  • Harari implies that the Bible is not true, because the Bible says that God created man from the dust of the Earth (Genesis 2:7).
  • Harari presupposes that the Earth is billions of years old, when in fact the Earth is only about 6,000 years old (see Genesis 1-2).
  • Harari implies that man is not inherently higher than the apes, when in fact man has been endued with the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which includes rationality and morality. We have the moral concepts of right and wrong (which apes lack) because God gave them to us.

One more thing: Harari writes as though fossil evidence has proven that man developed from apes, and that all sorts of “missing links” have been discovered. In reality, all such “transitional forms” between monkeys and man have been shown to be hoaxes (see bit.ly/1HQhQwl). For example, Harari says that we descended from Neanderthals, “bulkier and more muscular than us Sapiens.” While some of us may indeed be very distantly related to the creatures that scientists have called “Neanderthals,” these men were actually Homo sapiens themselves! They were not ape-like creatures any more than you or I (see bit.ly/1Cri1hp). Our grandmother was not an ape-like creature, but rather a human being just like us. We all come from the same source—not a common evolutionary ancestor, but a common Creator.