Chimps may be 4% different, genetically from Humans, yet this fact is largely irrelevant, and not especially useful in anyway.
Largely irrelevant? Are you kidding? A 4% difference between chimps and humans means they are 96%
similar. NINETY-SIX percent! And you call that
irrelevant? For someone who recognizes design in nature (rightly so, I think), and who concludes a designer (erroneously, I think), you are remarkably blind to the biological implications of the huge similarity between chimps and humans.
Similarities and differences are simply what they are, based on the designs found in the genes.
Complexity in nature simply is what it is, based on the millions of years it took for that complexity to evolve. Sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it?
Not much if any biological information can be gleaned from the fossil record.
Again, you must be joking, right?
Biologists are not only able to reconstruct from a fossil what an animal probably looked like when alive (and although they may be wrong at times, they are getting better at it as more biological knowledge is coming in from different disciplines), but they're also able to put togeher, from the fossil record, complete models of ecosystems of the past, which, by the way, also give us valuable insights in our own present ecosystem.
Please, do not project your own ignorance on others.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.