Did humans evolve from an ape-like creature, or was man created in the image of God? If humans were created in the image of God, then there’s no reason to believe humans ever had fur, and we can come up with some pretty good reasons why fur would not be helpful, or why it might be a hinderance.

But for evolutionists, the question is much harder because they must explain how losing fur is an advantage. After all, mammals with fur seem to benefit from having fur.

So this article from The Scientist begins by explaining the advantages fur has for furry animals. Fur insulates from both cold and heat, and offers protection against insects, sharp things and the sun. Fur can also serve to waterproof animals, keep them dry, sense their environment, and act as camouflage.  

Chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, mandrills, gibbons, and orangutans have fur, offering some of the protections listed above. But man, according to evolutionists, is a hairless ape. So, if we evolved from an ape-like ancestor, how did we lose our fur coats, and why? Well, evolutionist Nina Jablonski offers the standard explanation, namely that it must have offered an evolutionary advantage. Ta-da!

Seriously, this is the only explanation an evolutionist can truly provide. It explains why birds have feathers, carnivores have sharp teeth, fish have fins, snakes have scales, dolphins have flippers, and clams have shells. These body parts offer advantages. Thus, if an animal has special features (or doesn’t) it’s because there was or wasn’t an evolutionary advantage. Get it? But consider, if an animal evolved some feature without it offering an evolutionary advantage, or lost a feature which did offer an advantage, then they could face extinction, right? They’d be at an evolutionary disadvantage because they didn’t evolve enough useful advantages fast enough. Therefore, obviously, if they’re not extinct, whatever features they have, must, by definition, offer an evolutionary advantage.

Unfortunately, this explanation isn’t very helpful as it doesn’t truly explain WHY humans don’t have fur. All it does is describe a supposed evolutionary transition that may have never happened. Still, the author attempts to answer the question.

This brings us back to man, and why evolutionists think we flourished after losing our fur rather than go extinct. Jablonski explains all this started way back (before any anthropologist could observe our history) about two million years ago, and it occurred because of climate change. Wooded landscapes, you see, turned into open grassland. Therefore, she says, our human ancestors “had to spend more time outdoors to find food and water.” This begs the question- had humans already gone indoors? If so, then they were probably fully human and already hairless, having escaped the elements. It’s almost like Jablonski skipped a few million years.

As you can see, evolution gets messy. The article is very brief, and the author mentions nothing helpful. Just vague, evolutionary assumptions she expects her audience to accept without question. But good science requires us to question the science, so let’s continue.

It sure sounds like these evolutionists are claiming that spending more time outdoors, after spending time indoors, and then walking and running long distances is what provided an evolutionary advantage to losing fur. The explanation is convoluted. There’s no clear cause and effect.

But it gets worse. Jablonski points to more evolutionary changes that must have been occurring at the same time. She says humans were walking and running long distances, and, supposedly, that’s when we evolved our modern human skeleton with longer legs and shorter arms. Are you following all this? Further, they say we were evolving larger brains, as well as sweat glands and darker skin pigmentation. These changes were necessary to compensate for the other changes to regulate body temperature.

That’s an awful lot of evolution in a relatively short amount of time, and if it hadn’t happened, we’d be extinct. Imagine the energy required to drive those evolutionary changes. Wouldn’t it have been far more efficient for no changes to occur (stasis), and to use the energy elsewhere? If losing hair were really an evolutionary advantage, then why didn’t all other primates follow suit? Notice that modern chimps, monkeys and gorillas didn’t go furless, develop more sweat glands, grow longer legs, shorter arms, bigger brain, darker skin pigmentation, etc., yet they didn’t go extinct. Is it because their environment didn’t change enough, or there was no evolutionary advantage? Why didn’t gorillas start running longer distances? Didn’t climate change affect them? And, more importantly, how did all these evolutionary changes happen in coordination? It’s as if the genome was communicating with itself to plan for a specific outcome, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the author comes to the point, suggesting that thermoregulation “seems like the most likely explanation for human hairlessness.” But this violates one of the rules of evolution. Evolution is not directional, nor does it set out to accomplish a specific task or goal, like thermoregulation, which is very complicated. So how did evolution come up with an such an advanced solution? Did the environment trigger thermoregulation? Consider, if we were to put chimps on an island with predators, but no trees, how long would this thermoregulation process take place so they could begin running long distances and grow bigger brains? Could a real-world experiment affirm this evolutionary story as truth or myth?

According to evolutionists, evolution doesn’t have to happen at all for millions or billions of years (stasis), but when it happens, it isn’t supposed to be directional or intentional. Evolution is supposed to be more like an experiment- if it happens at all- where an organism’s genome is figuring out what works best in any given environment. But doesn’t it seem odd that a long list of evolutionary changes were supposedly happening all at the same time in just one lineage, but no evolutionary change in any other? Not only does it seem unlikely, but perhaps manufactured. If all these evolutionary changes didn’t occur in the right order, wouldn’t there be an evolutionary disadvantage, causing extinction? What if we lost hair, but didn’t add more sweat glands? What if we added more sweat glands but didn’t lose our fur?

I suppose we could have migrated north, where it was cooler, and we could have kept our fur coats, but then we wouldn’t be human. We’d just be northern apes, I guess. Or perhaps we could have migrated to where modern chimps and gorillas live, and we’d be competing with them today.

But if modern humans did have fur, we’d spend more time vacuuming up the fur in our homes, more time drying off after a shower, and we’d be more comfortable in colder climates, and likely wouldn’t need clothing. How different things would be!

In the end, I suggest humans did not evolve from any animal, and that’s one major reason why we don’t have fur. One must believe in evolution in order to claim we lost our fur, but any explanation is simply ad-hoc and offers no real value. After all, how can evolutionists verify these claims? They can’t. One must believe them by faith.

From a creationist perspective, however, it’s easier to see why God designed us without fur. We are perfectly designed to accomplish what God wanted us to do, which was to spread across the earth, have dominion over the animals, and subdue the earth. And with all our sweat glands and our ability to make clothing, we don’t need fur. We can regulate ourselves by making our own clothing and shelter.