Each species evolves in the way that it has. Evolution doesn't necessarily always go to greater complexity--genes take the best way available to them given the environment. Complex language may not necessarily result. The "intermediate forms" (to call them that--that is really a human perspective) died out. Our closest living relatives are the chimpanzees, with whom we share a high percentage of genes. Our most common recent ancestor (with the chimps) died out about 5 million years ago. I think Old World monkeys split off from us 35 million years before that.
Well, yes, there are many amazing things humans can do. This much is clear. Don't get it twisted though, humans owe much of our advanced place not to our brains, but to walking upright and having dextrous fingers that can handle delicate objects. Moreover we're no more immune to environmental forces than say a cat, in some sense our advanced culture bore out of our inability to survive on just our genetics alone. Seems to me our skills in corroperation and socializing are what allowed us to "beat" our closest relatives. The Earth shall happily and quite effortlessly sweep us away when she is done with us. Our achievements have greatly improved our ability to enjoy our lives but hasn't made them any less fragile.
We are apes. It's a classification of a certain type of species, and we fall under that group.
Last I checked I think England had about 68% that identified as atheism/agnostic/deist and I think 80% (or damn close) sided with Evolution (regardless of religious affliation).
Hominoidea is the superfamily we refer to when we use the term Ape, which, as you say, includes Homo Sapiens. Colloquially it's typically meant to refer to "non human primates" although that is woefully wrong.
The genes in our body that code for our bilateral symmetry, and those that code for the creation of our eyes are almost identical in the genetic codes of species with whom our nearest common ancestor dates back to the Cambrian (which ironically is when eyes first appear in the fossil record).
); and that explicitly includes chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and humans. This conforms to the evolutionary family tree. Chimps, for example, are much closer cousins to humans than gorillas. So it would be odd for them to be in a group with more distant relatives while the closer one (us) is arbitrarily excluded.
It’s semantics. “Ape” isn’t actually a scientific category - so the term is a bit elastic. Some mean it as “all non-human members of the hominidae family.” Others use “ape” as shorthand for the entire hominidae family (easier to pronounce
How about '..but we are tail-less primates' ?
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