The Story:
There remains a good deal of opposition, especially within “culture war” fighting precincts in the United States, to the ideas that species evolve; that the human species, also known as homo sapiens, has only been around for a small fraction of the time that life has existed in the planet; and specifically that homo sapiens is derived from older primate species. One recent example of this hostility is a recent statement of Herschel Walker, if “man came from the apes,” he wanted to know, “why are there still apes?”
Significance:
The word “ape” is one of common English language speech, not biological classification. But if we take “apes” to be a generic term for the non-human larger primates, the question sounds a bit like this, “If I have a grandfather, why do I still have cousins?” Much of the population no longer has a living grandfather, but does have cousins, and (translating the metaphor back to the primate family tree) the term “apes” broadly covers them both.
Strange New Worlds:
Yes, contemporary biology does hold that the “apes” we see at the zoo are in a broad sense our evolutionary cousins. But for our evolutionary grandfathers one ought rather to focus on the Australopithecus. The Australopithecus are extinct, perhaps for precisely the reason the question suggests: they competed with the hominids for the same small ecological niche and lost out in that competition.
