Since the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” during the 1920’s—which involved the state of Tennessee’s effort to punish John Scopes for teaching evolution in a public high school—Americans have largely come to believe that science and religion (or specifically evolutionary biology and contemporary Christianity) offer strikingly different answers to the question of our beginnings. This is no doubt true if the conversation solely concerns whether humans were the direct and instantaneous creation of God or evolved precariously from a lowly anthropoid ancestor.  But when the question is framed in terms of what attributes make us “human” and how these traits both differentiate us from and link us to animals, the lines between religion and science on the issue of our origins become blurred.