Humans Are Not Souped-Up Apes
The human mind and body are
overdesigned with abilities and
behaviors above and beyond
the needs of mere survival
Human Behavior Shows We’re “Far More Complex Than a ‘Souped-Up’ Ape”
by Jerry Bergman, PhD
Claims that humans are “naked apes,” “hairless apes,” or “only a monkey shaved,” imply that, although evolutionists believe that humans evolved from some hypothetical ape-like ancestor through natural selection, humans remain fundamentally apes. Intelligent design advocate Dr Casey Luskin recently critiqued this notion.[1]
Such characterizations also mean that natural selection would not favor behaviors or skills exceeding what is necessary for survival in the ancestral environments in which humans are thought to have evolved, Luskin argues.[2]
A recent paper published in the Elsevier journal Quaternary Environments and Humans raises this critical question: “Modern human origins: Do we know what we’re looking for?” In this work, University of Michigan Emeritus Professor of Anthropology John Speth presents evidence supporting the view that human behavior often extends well beyond what is required for survival and reproduction.
Speth highlights a range of common human activities that are not only unnecessary for survival, but may even hinder it:
skydiving, bungee jumping, or rock climbing; learn to walk on stilts or ride a unicycle; spend endless hours playing fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons; attend hours-long concerts, plays, or poetry readings; visit art museums; read lengthy tales about witches and wizards, or worship holy texts like the Bible, Torah, or Koran; spend time and money to see a movie about a Barbie doll or adventures that transpired “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…. Many of these activities and events could last for days or weeks, result in important lost opportunities, and entail substantial personal costs and risks. One would have to spin veritable “just-so” stories (Kipling, 1902) in order to explain such behaviors as wholly rational, optimal, cost-effective ways of enhancing one’s personal or inclusive fitness.[3]
Overdesign in Mental Capacity
This is a topic that personally I have been interested in for some time. The field is often described by the term overdesign. [4] Overdesign refers to cognitive abilities that exceed what would be necessary for basic survival and reproduction.
Examples include extraordinary mental capacities exhibited by certain individuals, such as musical savants and mathematical savants who can perform seemingly impossible feats—for instance, calculating the square root of a six-digit number within seconds.[5] One example is the square root of 9,876,356, which is 3142.66702022. (I used AI to calculate it.)
Other notable cases include individuals with hyperthymesia, also known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), who can recall nearly every day of their lives after age six in remarkable detail.[6] Similarly, so-called calendar calculators possess the ability to instantly determine the day of the week for virtually any given date.[7] For example, when asked, “On what day of the week did June 3, 1925 fall?” such an individual can immediately correctly respond: “Wednesday.”
These abilities are often cited as illustrative of overdesign because they go far beyond typical functional requirements which evolution selects for. Some savant syndrome individuals (formerly, and offensively, referred to as “idiot savants”) demonstrate performance levels that exceed those of more than 99.9 percent of the population.[8]
The Body Shows Overdesign, Too
Additional examples are often drawn from the remarkable resilience and capacity of the human body. Many anatomists argue that the strength and functional reserves of various organs and bodily structures exceed what is typically required for ordinary survival.[9] Numerous cases exist that illustrate this point.
- One striking example is that of a 17-year-old girl who survived a catastrophic airplane disaster over the Amazon on Christmas Eve in 1971. After the aircraft was struck by lightning and disintegrated, she fell approximately two miles into the jungle while still strapped to her seat—and survived. Although her fall was broken by the trees and she was severally injured, she recovered and lived for many years after.
- Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant who holds the Guinness World Record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute, fell 6.3 miles on January 26, 1972 and survived in spite of suffering a skull fracture and her legs and three vertebrae were broken. Vesna Vulović did not die from the injuries she sustained due to her 1972 fall. Within ten months she fully recovered the ability to walk and went on to live a long life. Trees broke the fall of the fuselage section and snow on the hill cushioned its landing. The plane was broken up by a bomb planted by a terrorist.
Such cases are frequently presented as evidence of the extraordinary durability and latent capacity of the human body, suggesting performance margins that extend far beyond what would normally be considered necessary for survival.
Evolution Teaches
From an evolutionary perspective, the vast majority of human history involved relatively simple modes of locomotion and survival, including climbing and walking in both arboreal and terrestrial settings. Yet, despite this background, most healthy adults are capable, with sufficient training, of acquiring a wide range of sophisticated skills. These include skiing, cycling, driving automobiles, flying jet aircraft, and performing music using complex instruments at a high level.
If humans are the product of intelligent design, such capacities would be expected; otherwise, they present a significant explanatory challenge. Specifically, it is not understandable why a mind shaped for survival in an African savanna environment would possess capabilities that extend far beyond what most individuals utilize in everyday life.[10] Speth adds that humans are not
wholly rational players in the game of life, whether present-day Western or traditional Indigenous, are unquestionably of value for establishing baseline economic parameters, but they are hardly sufficient to capture the mind-boggling sweep of costly, time- and energy-consuming, and at times risky non-rational behaviors that comprise a great deal of human life, and clearly make us something far more complex than just a “souped-up” ape.[11]
The average person is capable of achievements that no primate can match, including the following few examples:
- A friend who designed book covers for me once painted an image of a bear with such extraordinary detail that, at first glance, I was convinced it was a high-resolution color photograph.
- Young gymnasts at the Olympic Games who perform complex triple-flip routines with remarkable grace and precision illustrate a level of coordination and discipline far beyond anything observed in the animal kingdom.
- I personally struggled to learn German, a requirement for my Ph.D., to the point that I needed a private tutor. A family acquaintance, a German war bride, also assisted me. My advanced mathematics coursework was for me considerably easier by comparison.
- When I was practicing my German, a friend decided he would also learn German so that he could help me learn the language. Within a few weeks, he was reading, writing, and speaking the language at what appeared to me to be a near-fluent level.
- At one point, my son accepted a professorship in Norway. When I asked how he intended to teach students without speaking Norwegian, he replied that he would simply learn Norwegian. Within a few months, he had achieved sufficient fluency to teach university courses in Norwegian, adding it to his existing knowledge of other languages, including Spanish.
- On one visit to the Toledo art museum, I noted a large picture of a modern city illustrated in enormous detail. It looked like a large color photograph, but on close inspection it was clearly a painting. I do not understand how someone could achieve this skill.
Summary
According to evolutionists, the vast majority of human history involved relatively simple modes of locomotion and survival, including climbing and walking in both arboreal and terrestrial settings. Humans exhibit mental and physical abilities that are impossible to explain by a purely gradual evolutionary process driven by survival-of-the-fittest mutations. These abilities provide strong support for the view that humans are far more than mere hairless apes as claimed in many evolutionary books and articles.
References
[1] Luskin, Casey, “Human behavior shows we’re “far more complex than just a ‘souped-up’ ape,” https://scienceandculture.com/2026/06/paper-human-behavior-shows-were-far-more-complex-than-just-a-souped-up-ape/, 2026.
[2] Luskin, Casey.
[3] Speth, John, “Modern human origins: Do we know what we’re looking for?,” Quaternary Environments and Humans 4(1): 1-17, March, p. 4.
[4] Bergman, Jerry, “Another Example of Over-Design: Tardigrades. Creation Matters 29(4):3-4. 2025.
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TFYa1v9xI
[6] Roberts, Amber, “The people who can remember every single day of their lives,” https://www.vice.com/da/article/we-spoke-to-a-guy-who-remembers-almost-everything-about-his-life/, 2015.
[7] Cowan, Richard, and Chris Frith, “Do calendrical savants use calculation to answer date questions? A functional magnetic resonance imaging study,” Philosophy Transactions of the Royal Society of London B Biological Sciences. 364(1522):1417–1424. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0323, 27 May 2009.
[8] Bergman, Jerry, “The problem of overdesign for Darwinism,” Answers Research Journal 15:11–20, https://assets.answersresearchjournal.org/doc/v15/over_design_darwinism.pdf, 2022.
[9] Burgess, Stuart, “Overdesign in the human being with a case study of facial expressions,” Journal of Creation 28(1):98-103, April 2014.
[10] Dembski, William A., “Reflections on human origins,” https://billdembski.com/documents/2004.06.Human_Origins.pdf, 2004.
[11] Speth, 2026, p. 4.
Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,900 publications in 14 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.