There’s no such thing as devolving. Lets look at how apes live: they live outdoors, naked, with no technology, and find their own food. A gorilla is much more specialized in surviving outdoors than a human. Evolution has made the gorilla better than the human to survive in these conditions. If anything, the gorilla is superior to you in outdoor survival.
Animals evolve to survive in their niche. There’s no good or bad way to do this. A blind fish at the bottom of the ocean isnt a devolved form of a sighted fish, its a fish that doesnt have to worry about the additional complexity and caloric load of having eyes it doesnt need.
Your friend doesnt understand the grade-school basics of evolution. You can dismiss her opinion.
We can’t turn back into damn, dirty apes because we never stopped being damn, dirty apes.
However, we are neotenous damn, dirty apes, which means we have retained into adulthood features that are generally present only in juveniles of other apes. Were our lifespan sufficient, our “grown up” appearance may well resemble more typical apes.
That’s still a far cry from “devolving back into apes”, though, in that it’s
completely different.
People who would say “God told me” generally don’t believe in evolution so they probably wouldn’t claim we are devolving. She probably went on a few dates with players from the football team.
All I can say is that she profoundly misinterprets what evolutionary biology says. We didn’t involve from apes in the first place, so it’s nonsensical to suggest we’re involving back into something from which we didn’t come.
Further, she seems to be of the mind that evolution is goal-oriented, with some kind of Lamarckianian view. I suppose 200 years ago her argument would have at least relevant, but it no longer is since this isn’t the view held by mainstream science. There’s no such thing as devolution as that implies a goal. There’s only evolution, which is just change in the gene pool over time.
You’re right, of course; I was speaking informally. What I meant by ‘primates’ was more like some ancestral form that most people, upon encountering it, would rather identify as monkey than as human. We’re apes now and would be apes even after a mutated T-cell activates our dormant genes, but we’ll no longer be human then, at least not what most people would recognize as being human.
I don’t understand this. We evolved from apes, just as chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans did. That fact does not conflict with us still being apes, along with our cousin apes.
He/she could mean that we didn’t “evolve from” apes, anymore than someone who moves from one neighborhood in New York to another has “moved from” New York.
The most recent common ancestor of humans, gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans was a species of ape. That’s pretty much all I’m understanding by “We evolved from apes.” Similarly, we evolved from primates, from eutherians, from mammals, from chordates, etc. Why does “evolved from” mean that we are no longer members of those taxa?
It is possible to “devolve,” however, it would still be forward evolution. It could occur in a situation where a trait that was previously adaptive has a new tendency to cause the organism to die before reproduction. In this situation the trait would be selected against.
One can imagine various scenarios. For example, how did fish who live exclusively in caves come to lose their eyes? Eyes can be considered a more sensitive organ than many other parts of the body, and they may also cost more energy as compared to a fish that doesn’t have eyes. Perhaps in certain cave environments the availability of food fluctuates and fish who have a slightly less developed set of eyes tend to live a bit longer owing to the reduced energy requirements, and so on and so forth.
That’s all total baloney that I made up of course, but it is quite plausible. The girl in your biology class needs to come up with a clear theory about how some of our traits are “devolving,” or no longer adaptive, before we can really consider it.
There is, however, a relatively recent trend of the poor outbreeding the rich. If you believe that future time orientation and intelligence are correlated with economic outcomes (not controversial), and that both these traits are partly inherited (also likely), this does mean that we are undergoing dysgenic selection. This would be a reversal of the trend up to the Industrial Revolution, when the rich outbred the poor. Dysgenics, unlike “devolution”, is a real possibility.
Now you’re talking. Your earlier post simply didn’t do, so I chose to be terse.
We have a common ancestor with the other apes which was ape-like. But we didn’t evolve from the apes.
As Der pointed out, a person who moves from one side of New York to another didn’t move from New York. He merely moved within New York. We evolved from a common ancestor along with the other great apes, but we didn’t evolve from them anymore than they did from us. Our common ancestor wasn’t an ape either; it was ape-like.
I heard that if we let dogs run wild and breed as they see fit, they’d eventually “devolve” back to wolves. Since there’s very little genetic variation between the two, is this theoretically possible?
