Are humans “naked apes”?

This is a picture of me. Really. My blog is not about me even though I constantly write in the first-person voice and often use myself as an example to make a point. In this post, I again intend to use myself as an example to make a point.

Over my lifetime, I've worn my facial hair in a variety of styles. My hair grows fairly quickly so I could literally change it from week to week if I wanted. There have only been a couple of times in my adult life that have I been clean shaven. From the time I graduated high school until I was about 35, I wore a mustache. On a couple of occasions during that time, I grew a full beard. For the last couple of years, I've worn a goatee off and on. Actually, I think the correct term for a goatee and a mustache is a Van Dyke but I'm starting to ramble. Let's get back to the point.

So, a while back, I was watching a YouTube video and the speaker flashes a picture of a chimp on the screen. It was a tight shot of just the chimp's face and I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. Compare the picture of the me to the picture of the chimp below. Ignore the difference in resolution for a moment – do you notice anything different about our hair? In case the answer isn't immediately obvious, let me point it out:

Men grow facial hair on their upper lip, jaw, and chin. We also have hair on our brow ridge (aka, our eye brows). Chimps have virtually no hair around their mouth nor on their brow ridge. Isn't that interesting? It goes further than that though. Chimps have heavy coats on their backs and shoulders but thinner hair on their chests. In this picture, you can also see that chimps have thinner hair in their arm pits. Human males, on the other hand, have thicker hair on their chests and under their arms but much thinner hair on their shoulders and arms.

Humans have been called, “naked apes.” As the name suggests, humans are considered by evolutionists to be merely another species of ape – one which has lost its heavy coat of fur. It's a little more complicated than that though. You see, evolution is supposed to be about descent with modification. If humans and chimps share a common ancestor, evolution should predict that we have hair patterns similar to our ancestor. But we don't. The closest similarity is the top of our heads. Everywhere else, where chimps have the most hair, we have the least and where we have the most, chimps have the least.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have noticed this. I've heard it suggested that humans have facial hair for warmth because our clothes cover our bodies but not our faces. Such an explanation is blatantly circular. Why would we need to start wearing clothes in the first place except that we lost our fur? And even if we accept the explanation, it still doesn't explain why humans have heavier hair under their arms.

Good theories are supposed to make predictions. If evolution were true, we should see similar hair patterns between humans and chimps. The ad hoc explanations about why it isn't this way are “just so” stories invented simply to ignore another failed prediction of evolution.