There’s a question that’s all too familiar to biology educators: “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” It’s so prevalent that the anthropologist Jonathan Marks mischievously entitled a recent book Why Are There Still Creationists? (2021) without bothering to explain the joke. Sometimes the question is posed as a stumper, in the mistaken belief that it exposes a decisive failure of evolution; sometimes, perhaps more often, it is more of a cry for help, expressing sincere puzzlement. Either way, of course, the claim of evolution is not that humans evolved from monkeys but that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor that lived millions of years ago in the Oligocene.
Unfortunately, it’s usually not sufficient just to correct the misclassification of that common ancestor. A useful way to continue the conversation: assuming that the questioner claims to be of, for instance, Irish descent, ask, “If you’re descended...
University of California Press