You interpret this...

"The authors of the 1982 Science paper had no hesitancy in declaring that "the telomeric fusion of chromosomes 2p and 2q accounts for the reduction of the 24 pairs of chromosomes of the great apes to 23 in modern man." But they could not confirm this with the high-powered techniques of modern genetics."

as this....

What struck me is that the fusion of telomeres was claimed as a prediction of evolution in 2005, but did,nt I read in the article that they had the data in the eighties?


Read it again please.

I don't thing it is so much a "prediction of evolution" as an explanation of why we have fewer chromosomes than our cousins. What confuses me is how you seem to accept how closely related we are to apes while rejecting the scientific explanation of how that came to be.