Granite,
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Christians have not " admitted the genetic similarities existed between ape and man,". This sounds to me to be similar to the myth that the Bible teaches that all species were created by God in the beginning and have never changed since then.
There are genetic similarities between lifeforms just as there are morphological similarities as well. Bacteria have some genes that look remarkably like their counterpart in human beings.
This similarity can be due to at least two strikingly different concepts (and even perhaps a combination of the two) :
1) all life has descended from a single hypothetical primitive protocell,
OR
2) multiple types of life were created in the beginning by a very clever designer who gave them the built-in ability to rapidly change in response to a changing environment.
ALL of the evidence (mountains of it
) points to concept #2 as being the most important as far as macroevolution is concerned.
One of the reasons I believe this is because of a project I once undertook to create a "clone" of Apple Computer's Hypercard programming system. The clone was called Microcard, and was designed to run on IBM PCs.
One of the reasons I undertook this rather ambitious project was to explore the limits of an unusual programming language known as FORTH. Interestingly JAVA appears to be an extension of FORTH.
During the time of this project I discovered a number of interesting things, not only about FORTH but also about the underlying nature of computer programs: at the nitty gritty level almost all programs contain basic functions that are so similar that they could be called subprograms or subroutines.
What this meant in concrete terms was that once the underlying basic routines were available in FORTH that all of the many different functions and capabilities present in the rather elaborate Hypercard system could be easily realized by merely arranging the basic functions in short strings of implementing code.
As a result, Microcard turned out to contain a minimum of code, less than 128K, whereas as some of you may know, Apple's Hypercard is a very large beast containing millions of lines of code. This is not to knock Hypercard. It is a very fine system and was very succesful, but Microcard was not only far more compact but faster in execution as well, primarily because it was small enough so as to avoid any memory paging, which as is well known drastically slows down any fast CPU to the inchworm speed of even the fastest hard drive. But I digress.
This experience has been in my "subconscious" as I study what is being discovered about DNA and other mechanisms of life. This has caused me to hypthesize what may be going on with lifeforms. Of course one can take analogies too far, but the point is that we know very little about how lifeforms develop at this point in time and it seems to me that the analogy with subfunctions is an important insight. It may explain why bacteria have some genes that appear to be so similar to those in humans: could it be that there are functions that any lifeform has to have and so a subfunction which performs it would be expected to be similar?
It has been a puzzle as to how it is that the complex human species has so few genes, not that many more than simpler forms and even fewer than some "simple" creatures. Perhaps it is how the subfunctions (individual genes plus gene complexes) are
assembled into larger elements (as I discovered in my Microcard project) that might explain such mysteries.