Absolutely. There were animals on Earth before humans.
But before you get going, let me explain that I am not a Young Earth Creationist. I’m more of an Intelligent Design believer. I’ll even stipulate that humans may be descended from apes (evidence says its highly likely), but *something* happened at some point that gave some apes that spark of intelligence that led to humanity. The lack of fossil record says that it was sudden and following that divergence, apes did not continue to evolve, but humans did.
If the “sudden divergence” occurred in one ape that made him a proto-human, he still had to breed back with a non-human ape, which would have likely slowed the development of humans. But, even assuming that the human gene is dominant, the humanlike apes would have had to seek each other out to breed and eventually give birth to the first apelike humans.
How many times do you get to hit the Lotto on those kinds of odds, without some divine interaction?
No it doesn't. You have more DNA in common with a snake than you do a monkey.
>>How many times do you get to hit the Lotto on those kinds of odds, without some divine interaction?
I.D. has an allure, since it bridges some difficult philosophical divides. But is has no place in science since it can’t be applied nor used.
Just keep ID in its philosophical, theological realm and all is OK. It is when people try to put it into science that there are problems.
And lets not forget about rats and pigs. There is good reason we use those in lab research.
We can even “grow” a new heart, liver kidney etc. for humans in lab, based on the protein structures of pigs which are very simular, and compatable with ours.
what is done is all traces of DNA is “washed” from the protein structure of a pigs heart. These simple proteins are like the building blocks of organic life, once stripped, human blood and t-cells are re introduced to the structure, and it eventually grows new human tissue from the information within human t cells in the blood onto this structure.