Every now and then we have a thread on The Stupidest Thing you Overheard or something like that. The question posed in the OP invariably finds its way into such threads. The thing is, is it really that stupid of a question? A few years ago, before I became somewhat more educated on the topic, someone who should have known better posed this question to me. I had to think about it for a while, and my somewhat lame answer was “Try not to think of evolution as a straight line of inevitability, but a branching tree of opportunity.”
Actually, the posed question might have been more like “If environmental pressures cause evolution, then how come monkeys and humans live in the same areas?” Had I answered the question more directly, I might have said “Migration.”
So my questions to you are:
Are the posed questions really all that stupid, giben that the asker is only partially educated on the subject?
Were my answers adequate?
What are better answers? Where am I missing the absurdity of the posed questions?
Not really, no. The problem is that humans didn’t evolve from monkeys. That’s just a very popular misunderstanding. Monkeys and humans evolved from a common ancestor. Completely different thing.
“If I have cousins, why are my grandparents still alive?”
Obviously, this works better if your grandparents are in fact still alive, but I think the point comes across.
Sorry, I meant to address this bit. Let us suppose that I had corrected the asker on this bit, or that instead of monkeys the asker said “other nonspecific apes.” Of course, that nonspecificity sort of blurs the question.
Well, true, but irrelevant to the misunderstanding, really. What people are really asking is if X evolved from Y, why do we still have Y? (Bonobos from chimps, or vice versa, to give one still-living example.) And the lay answer is: because not every single X turns into a Y. Rather one X gives birth to a strange X because strange X has just a tiny chromosomal difference from any other X. That strange X’s difference means he survives better - maybe his mutation means he can better see the ripe berries, or can climb trees better or something. He’s still a X, he can still have fertile babies with an X, but he’s a strange X. Over time, he has more strange X babies who have babies who have babies and you get stranger and stranger Xs - eventually so strange that they can’t or won’t mate with the regular Xes, and now we call them Y’s. There are still all those other, regular X’s out there that aren’t from our strange X’s family line, but now we have X’s *and *Y’s.
I find the easiest analogy is: look, Mr. Smith, what’s your sister’s married name? Mrs. Jones? OK, so if a Smith became a Jones, why are there still Smiths? Because there are dozens of you Smiths, and only one became a Jones. All her children will be Joneses, but that doesn’t mean there are no more Smiths!
Funny, when I first read this, I thought it sounded both snide and meaningless. It is a little snide, but upon reflection it is a quite good analogy. A better phrasing might be “If I’m descended from my cousin, then how come we live in the same town?” It’s still a little snide, but gets the point across.
Humans didn’t evolve from any modern species of monkey, but the most recent common ancestor of humans and modern monkeys was, itself, a monkey. So humans did, in fact, evolve from monkeys. Similarly (and simianly), humans also evolved from apes (and by any rational standard, we are ourselves apes).
The short answer being “there aren’t”. The “monkey” in question (actually the monkey/human ancestor that was neither a monkey or a human, but had some of the characteristic of both) became extinct long ago.
Exactly, sorry for my sloppy wording. The question “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” clearly indicates that the asker believes we did evolve from modern monkeys, so the best answer to my mind is “we didn’t”, but griffin1977’s answer of “there isn’t” is equally correct.
That’s ridiculous though. If X evolved from Y you are somehow using some differentiator to claim that X and Y are different. Suppose you declare this branching point to be 10 million years ago. Even if there is a descendant Z of Y today that is in all respects identical to the Y, it still does not make Z a Y. If you are phrasing something as “X evolved from Y” there is no more Y, by definition.
Whatever today’s chimps evolved from might just happen to be the same thing today’s bonobo’s evolved from but that does not necessarily make that ‘thing’ a chimp or a bonobo. If you are willing to call it a chimp or a bonobo it is only because you choose to do so - and because you think it fits in one category better than in another.
There is no one unified definition of the word ‘species’ but most rely on ability to produce fertile offspring as well as similar characteristics. Things you would call monkeys millions of years ago might have similar characteristics with modern day monkeys and humans, and are our common ancestors but that does not make them the same species of monkey as any of today’s species since as far as I know monkeys can’t travel back in time to make any claim of speciation falsifiable.
The last name analogy and the cousin analogy just rub me the wrong way. Last names and cousins are specific relationships when “monkeys” a rather arbitrary collective term. Better analogy is imagine if your great great great uncle was the first airplane pilot in the world and before airplanes he was a soldier. Ever since then everybody in your family follows in his footsteps and becomes a pilot. How come there are still not only pilots not related to you but also soldiers as well?
To take a less contentious example: it’s generally accepted that domestic dogs evolved from wolves – and those wolves would have been much the same as the wild wolves that are around today. But it’s not seen as such a paradox for dogs to have eveloved from wolves, but wolves to still be around. Perhaps that’s because it’s pretty obvous why dogs have evolved faster, firstly to fit in with a relationship with humans, and then with artificial breeeding by humans.
While far from an expert, I’ve been doing a little reading on the origins of humans, and it seems pretty clear to me that humans evolved fairly rapidly, perhaps because of environmental pressures, and perhaps because they went through a period with a very low population of human ancestors. So the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans may well have been much more like modern chimpanzees than like modern humans. Similarly, if we looked at the last common ancestor of the apes and monkeys, it would appear to us more monkey-like than ape-like.
