While attending Pepperdine University (a private Christian school) I was not surprised at how many fellow students rejected evolution in general and human evolution in particular. However, upon graduating, I found myself talking to countless people in the ‘real world’ that also rejected evolution; usually just human evolution.
I subscribe to the theory that part of the reason why so few people accept human evolution is that humans do so many things to distance ourselves from our ‘animal side.’ We shave, wear clothes, make movies, use toilet paper, drive cars, etc. One other habit we have is calling ourselves ‘humans’ or human beings,’ which for me conjures up an image of something far from being an animal.
What if we called ourselves human apes or something along those lines to emphasize the fact that we are apes. It still maintains the ‘human’ in our title so we can distinguish ourselves from other apes, yet it seems to conjure up a less superior-to-nature kind of image in my mind. What do you think? Would this ever catch on?