http://chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/article/0,2669,SAV-0102180306,FF.html
I am sure they were aware of this, but were using immigration as an analogy. The fact that a fifth-generation American from European immigrants exists, doesn’t mean his cousins in Europe can’t exist. Neither decended from the other, they share a common ancestor.
Just like other apes and humans. Neither decended from the other, we share a common ancestor.
Let me commend everyone for being so polite!
What amazes me is that no one is pointing out that this question has been posed MANY times before and is being posted AGAIN!!! nick112 could have done a simple search of the boards and gotten his answer.
Let us stop lamenting about the state of our public school systems 9at least for now) and start griping about the rampant laziness in our society as exhibited by nick112!!!
Also 90% of all genetic material is not used and is usually left over remnants of viruses.
Determining how similar two species are genetically is actually pretty simple, and doesn’t require that either be sequenced. You just unzip a strand of DNA from each, and put the odd strands from the two species together and see how well they connect. Of course, there’s a good bit more to it than that, but that’s the general idea.
This is the joke I originally intended to make, but I got sidetracked defending the OP. But now’s my chance.
A planet where apes evolved from man?!?!
/hijack/
Is there any current species that is a descendent of a species that is still around? I mean, the original species didn’t go extinct and didn’t evolve that much but a branch (separated by geography or something) evolved separately?
I think that having an example such as that would make the explanation to the evolutionally challenged, easier.
/hijack/
Pstarr, IANABiologist, but I will take a stab at your question:
-
Shrew-like animals are considered the earliest mammals. Other mammals descended from these “shrews”. Tree shrews still exist today.
-
Sharks are a very, very old form of life. I THINK other fish descended from them.
-
Ferns are older than most all other land plants. I THINK other forms of plants evolved from fern-like plants.
from the guy with the really neat circus:
The thing of it is, i don’t even know if I still have any relatives in Europe. There was this guy named Stalin, you see, and a few million people in the Ukraine just disappeared.
I do, however, have a slew of fourth cousins in Argentina. Same family name. So my “phylogeny” has a severe “allopatric” event splitting a population of coal miners between Pennsylvania and South America from an ancestrial range in Eastern Europe.
Pstarr: Sure, there’s examples 
. Generally as the result of vicariance or immigration- i.e. a few members of species A are swept onto an island or the populations are partitioned by changing climatic conditions, or whatever. The isolated members of species A start heading off on another evolutionary trajectory and eventually the two populations are divergent enough to be called separate species ( i.e. species A and species B ). But the “parent” species remains roughly ( there’s bound to be minor changes, no matter what ) the same as it did in ancestral time when the populations diverged.
And then there is the quick and dirty way, which I’ll use as a specific example. The unisexual “species” of whiptail lizard, Cnemidophorus laredoensis is the result of a hybridization event between the bisexual species Cnemidophorus gularis and Cnemidophorus sexlineatus. Althouigh defining species is problematic for parthenogens ( in this case it is mostly done through morphology for practical reasons ), all three “species” coexist today with overlapping ranges.
bordelond: Actually from a systematic point of few, I’m pretty sure two of your three particular examples don’t hold up. At any rate there is a confusion of terms.
a.)Shrew-like, isn’t the same as shrew. I don’t think there is any relation other than a convergence of morphology.
b.)We ( including bony fish among the “we” ) share a common ancestor with sharks, but I believe we are from divergent lines ( I won’t swear to this just now, but I’m pretty sure ).
c.) You’re roughly right about ferns - But…
…As I said there is a confusion of terms. You’re examples reflect much broader levels of classification that species. i.e., it’s the difference between, say, all owls and the Eastern Screech Owl. Make sense 
?
- Tamerlane
So, do you differ from your parents by species or by genus?
http://anthro.palomar.edu/animal/humans.htm
Ross wrote:
But if an evolved change were not good from some point of view, it would die out. What your statement misses is that there’s not just a linear scale with humans on the “more evolved” end and bacteria on the other. Everything is evolved to do a good job of filling a particular niche. The great apes and humans shared a common ancestor, but we each have evolved toward a different niche. They’re good at what they do, and we’re good at what we do.
Beatle, I just wanted to say that this was one of the funniest posts I’ve read in weeks.
I am 50% banana?
True, the moderators & the folks in charge of the SDMB server might agree…but I think everyone gets to ask that question once.
Er, not precisely. If I recall correctly, the banana genome is considerably smaller than the human genome, so it’s more correct to say that bananas are 50% human.
It’s probalby true that they could be considered to be 50% elephant or 50% fruitfly, as far as that goes. . .
I just wanted to say that this is one of the best little threads I’ve seen in a while–esp. considering how picked-over the OP is. The cousins/Europeans analogy is the sharpest explanation I’ve heard to explain evolution…and I’m amazed I’ve never heard it before!