Chimps as smart as preschoolers?

The Associated Press (AP) reported on January 6, 2000, that a chimpanzee ‘performed about as well as an average (Japanese) preschool child’ on similar numerical tests. The female chimp can apparently ‘remember the correct sequence of 5 random numbers’, according to researchers at Kyoto University in Japan.

We expect that evolutionists will use this study to bolster their claim of a close evolutionary relationship between humans and chimps. But how closely related are we to chimps, apes, monkeys, etc.? Previous articles in Creation magazine have dealt with this issue, including one on how enthusiasm has been dampening on the ‘reasoning’ and ‘language’ ability of chimps (see ‘Bird-brain matches chimps’), and that science shows that the DNA of chimps does not offer compelling biological evidence that they are closely related to humans. (See ‘How Close are Humans and Chimps?’)