As if anyone is claiming we're derived from modern chimps...
Meanwhile the ancient apes that we share as common ancestors with modern apes are long extinct.
Not to mention evolution doesn't require an extinction as far as I know. See polar bears
The only person I've ever met in my life who did not believe in evolution was a catholic priest. It's honestly bewildering to me that evolutionary sceptics are common enough to warrant a note in mainstream media or even just normal conversation. To me it's comparable to finding out there are still geocentrism apologists.
Although from what I've read it's more common in US. I'm in Europe so that may be the source of my bubble.
(1) But there is an important provision to be considered by the faithful: the teaching of evolution cannot patently claim that there is no God. It is outside the scope of any science to disprove (or prove) the existence of God. And thus it is a misrepresentation of the science for any of the faithful to claim otherwise. The Church respects science in its endeavor to sincerely discover truth; Pope John Paul II once put it as such in his writings (I am paraphrasing here): "Faith forms reason, reason informs faith."
(2) Darwin's work was in fact not motivated by a sense of atheism [1]. In fact, I believe that I once discovered that in the Forward to On the Origin of Species, he references God in a positive note. The exact comment escapes me--perhaps someone with the actual text can verify this.
[1] https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-12041.xml
One day the professor came in and very sternly told us something along the lines of "If you disagree with this and you want to walk out, that's fine - remember, you're the ones paying to be here, and you're adults and that's your choice. But I'd like to re-emphasis the 'you're adults' part - it is unacceptable for me to be receiving angry letters from your parents. If you don't pass this class because you walk out, that's on you and you need to own that consequence." ~ oof, it was a rough Monday.
Gregor Johann Mendel - father of modern genetics and Catholic friar.
Source: I'm Catholic today.
Specifically, from what I've read, they're likely to be much more prevalent in the US Bible Belt and other places with strong concentrations of evangelical fundamentalists, because despite Catholicism being extremely different doctrinally, the actual Catholics in that area are almost invariably going to be more influenced by the culture around them, including the attitude toward religion and science.
And that's very much the case. Formal Church documents confirm the belief, and the very large majority of Catholics believe it. There isn't anything contradictory in believing evolution may have been the means by which God created people.
Whether that was the case when or where anyone else was growing up, I can't attest. I'm only speaking to the commonality of the belief in the present.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/06/how-highly-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/12/30/publics-view...
Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution. Evangelicals tend to express the opinion that humans have existed in the same form forever.
As for evolution, the Christians literally believe man was made whole, along with every other living thing - a more sci-fi explanation would be massive viral and bacterial mutation, like a lichen growing legs and arms (bacteria and viruses both evolve at breathtaking speeds, so it is possible if unlikely).
Creationists do actually acknowledge evolution, they usually downplay its significance or spend a lot of time pointing the current scientific inconsistencies in mainstream evolutionary theories.
I think they are both a bit wrong - obviously Creationism is wildly optimistic about both an all powerful entity who creates things then mysteriously vanishes, never to be heard from again (discounting the delusions or child-exploitation of near death "I met god" accounts). There is a wide amount of expression our genes already afford us - it only takes a couple generations for most animals or plants to express very different visible traits. Couple that with invasive viral infections permanently mutating the gonad materials (eggs, sperm, spores) and wild environmental fluctuations (meteors hitting the ocean), you could experience evolutionary forces in a very short time frame. I don't know that you require billions or trillions of years in the margins of carbon dating.
Ignoring questions of whether the astrophysicists have it right with the age of the known universe (is the big bang truly the beginning of the universe or just an event in a multidimensional cosmos?), a middle ground where the evolutionists and Christians are both wrong seems more plausible to me - hominids have been around for a very, very long time, perhaps even coexisting hundreds or billions of years ago with dinosaurs. We just happen to exist post some set of climactic events, cutting us off from our history.
I should clarify - I am not pro Creationism, I used to appreciate having been taught a different theory, however apologist doesn't make for good science, especially when the mainstream theories have the easy out of calling anything else "Christian nonsense". E.g. in physics there is the standard model, and various competing alternative models, crucially there are no major appeals to authority and so competing theories can thrive. Evolution is almost political on the other hand, much the same as climate science.
I guess we had Christian physics, we called that witchcraft. Ironically, with some of the immoral things modern tech has enabled, perhaps the claims of beezlebub in your tech weren't off the mark wholly. They are plenty of angels in tech though too...
The common ancestor between us and bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs is still around. They're just bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangs and humans nowadays because some populations simply matched their environments over a (long) time and became more fit in their niche.
The question what constitutes a species, for sake of our classification desires, is also very relevant to this. Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Why do some of us have Neanderthal genes?
Generally, but then you have things like multiple canids being different species but able to produce viable hybrids (e.g. the large number of coywolves we have near me). Since "species" is a classification we made up which doesn't map to reality particularly well, it gets pretty fuzzy at the edges.
The latter might be too clever for their own good however, having invented carbon-fueled industry, super-powered AI, and various hyper-destructive weapons. Also Twitter. And NFTs.