From:    Simon Ewins
To:      Ron Stringfellow                   Msg #133, 08-Mar-93 08:48am
Subject: Monkeys

RS>   We're not the ones trying to make monkeys  of men.

No one is, the overwhelming evidence merely indicates that apes and humans
shared the same ancestor at some point. The following quote from Douglas J.
Futuyma is of much interest. I have also checked a couple of papers by the
individuals mentioned in his quote and it is well substantiated. Reports of
similar findings have been made by others as well.

"The similarities between ape and human proteins are extraordinary. For
example, hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in the blood, contains 287
amino acids in an identical sequence in chimpanzees and humans. Compare this
to the differences between two different species of frogs, whose hemoglobin
differs in 29 amino acids. Out of the 153 amino acids in myoglobin, a muscle
protein, humans and chimpanzees differ in only one. Mary-Claire King and
Allan Wilson, biochemists at the University of California at Berkeley,
estimate from an analysis of 12 different kinds of proteins that chimps and
humans differ on average at only 7 out of 1,000 amino acids. The evidence
from proteins and from direct analysis of DNA indicates that humans and apes
are more genetically similar to each other than certain species of fruit
flies or rodents that are _identical_ in external appearance. Apes and humans
are so similar that Allan Wilson and his colleague Vincent Sarich have
suggested that the human lineage branched off from the gorilla-chimpanzee
line only about 4 to 5 million years ago, and not the fifteen or so million
years previously estimated on the basis of the very inadequate fossil
record."

[His emphasis on the word _identical_ (italicized).]

I leave you to do your own further research.