Think about birds for a moment. There are crows and robins and eagles-- hundreds of different types of birds. Each has developed a specialty in its particular environment. For example, eagles have developed longer and stronger claws to kill small animals while some smaller birds develop specialized beaks to eat their food. A hummingbird developed a long slender beak and tube-like tongue in order to drink nectar from flowers; a robin can’t do that.
Humans simply branched off because they had a different specialty, like a different type of bird.
We did not evolve FROM modern day apes. Modern day apes and modern day homo sapiens share a COMMON ANCESTOR if you look back in time far enough.
And if you KEEP looking back you’ll find that both species share a common ancestor with trout. And all other life is related in the same way - think family tree, the latest generations are the newest branches, but you can follow all those branches back to the original trunk.
And just because we have some advantages over another species that doesn’t mean that the other species is doomed (although all the various monkeys are in deep doo-doo from humanity due to being hunted, loss of habitat, etc). I am not a biologist but I believe that various species may have big advantages in their particular habitat, that doesn’t mean said advantages rule supreme. Sure you’re smarter than a chimpanzee but go get in a fight with one and see what happens.
That’s because the answer is none of them. You might want to learn what evolution says at least to this rather primitive level before you try to debate it. If I said Christianity was absurd because the Bible said that Jesus jumped out of a flying saucer to do his miracles, you’d probably tell me to read the flippin’ Bible before opening my mouth. Nuff said?
Two things, Interest–no, three. No, four. First, humans did not evolve from any contemporary primate species, ape or otherwise, according to any non-insane anthropologist. We share a common ancestor with them.
Second, if you’ll just click on REPLY in the same box as the post you’re replying to, rather than scrolling all the way up or down to window, you’ll see that Vbulletin automatically quotes the post you’re replying to. Not only will this be easier for you, but it will be easier for the rest of us to follow.
Third, thanks for actually sticking around to discuss the thread you started rather than ducking & runing.
No, that’s not right although it’s a common misconception. Everything is always evolving. Chimps and humans split off from a common ancestor abotu 6M years ago. But that common ancestor was neither a chimp nor a human. Go back to my language ananlogy. Spanish, French and Italian all evolved from Latin. But none of them is Latin anymore. Each is a langauge distinct from the other and distinct from Latin. If you can understand this, you can understand evolution.
We are apes. You can’t define “ape” to include chimps gorillas and orangs and exclude humans. We are genetically closer to chimps than chimps are to gorillas. That’s a scientific fact.
That’s rather my point, actually. A random happenstance is not indicative of evolution (recall that your original claim was along the lines of “extinction is an example of evolution in action”). That is what I sought to refute: extinction can be evolution, but it can also be just plain old bad luck. Not bad luck in the sense of “why oh why was I cursed with these awful genes?” but “man, this is gonna suck, and there’s nothing I can do about it…”. The latter is not what I would call an evolutionary mechanism per se, thus my quibble. It may, perhaps, be a meaningless quibble, but, meh. I’m bored.
Others have attempted to correct you on this matter, but you are actually on to something here. You are missing something, but you do appear to see part of the picture.
As has been mentioned, populations change over time. With each new generation, mutations occur, selection occurs, the population slowly adapts. This process of gradual transition is known as “anagenesis”. In such a case, you are correct that the descendents will necessarily replace its ancestors over time. Note, however, that at no point is a species “perfected”. Anyway, anagenesis occurs, but it is not of particular importance in an evolutionary sense, because it does not actually increase diversity. A population transforms, displacing its parent stock, but in the end, you still have one species.
The piece you are missing is the evolutionarily interesting form of creating new species: cladogenesis. Here, a single population is divided through whatever means. Each population, now separated from the other, has its own set of variations which it may not now share with its former parent stock. Because the two populations no longer co-mingle, selection will act upon the distinct variations each populaton possesses, and over time, the two populations will diverge (via anagenesis). Eventually, those two populations may become distinct to the point where they can no longer interbreed, even if fate should somehow reunite them. We now have two species where there was once one. Net diversity has increased.
So it is with the Tree of Life. The branches can represent periods of anagenesis, the forks periods of cladogenesis. We exist with other apes because we have diverged from them, not evolved directly from them. We share cladogenetic ancestors with them; they are not our anagenetic ancestors.
At a basic level, it could just mean a bunch of critters that more or less look similar. Based on extant specimens, you can really just say “anything with feathers is a bird”. That is, after all, how Linnaeaus originally classified living things; he was a creationist, so wasn’t working from a hypothesis of them being similar by virtue of relationship, but rather by virtue of similar lifestyle.
It’s only when you begin to look more closely, and compare them to other critters that you start to see patterns emerge which might indicate something more than a passing similarity which might indicate actual interrelatedness.
Serious question: Do you have any actual desire to get it?
If you do, there are a lot of very smart people here who will be happy to dispel your ignorance and introduce you to the wonder of natural sciences.
If you don’t, if you’re just trying to yank chains and drag out the argument, you will get your ass handed to you. This board has chewed up and spit out many more informed and eloquent creationists than you; in this thread we haven’t yet broken a sweat.
The course of the thread will depend on your answer.
I will simply state that Evolution is often denounced for a theological interpretation of the world. In other words, it is denounced to promote some sort of creation story relevant to a particular religion. These “creation stories” are not biological theories but rather mark the “creation” of meaning. It is only in ex nihilo where nothing can come from something and these creation stories spark the beginning for the explanation of one’s existence.
The Catholic Church once viewed the world as perfect prior to Adam and Eve. None of the animals bit each other, sin only entered in once Adam arrived. Keep in mind Eve wasn’t created to hear God’s speil about not eating from the apple tree. Once science revealed carniverous animals existesed before man, the world of churchly theology was thrown into bedlam.
For a rather funny outlook see Saint Paul’s elaboration in 1 Corinthians:
Does there has to be a defined set of parents in the species for evolution to be true?
When did that occur and how did the male and female come to be in order to procreate an offspring?
Is it to difficult to determine so we have to accept that it did without the physical evidence?
IS there any evidence to show the split of a single species into male or female or did they just evolve that way? Are we going back to the question what came first the chicken or the egg?
You can define a word to mean anything that’s convenient for the purpose at hand. Moreover, it so happens that in ordinary layman’s English, the word “ape” usually excludes humans. So does the word “animal” for that matter, all despite how biologists would normally use these terms.
But I’m on your side here, really. I just think this mismatch of meanings might be letting people talk past each other. Sort of like the endless tiresome clashes over what a theory is — a word which to many people means something like “wild-ass guess.”
That’s what some people think biologists are talking about: The Wild-Ass Guess of Evolution.
I think our guest, Interest, is also hung up on how one “kind” of animal can derive from another “kind”. An ape didn’t come form a frog. But all these “kinds” of animals are more or less arbitrary constructs. What makes an ape different from a monkey except that we have created those two “kinds” ourselves. As we look in the fossil record, we see things that aren’t quite apes and arent quite monkeys. That’s because the further back in time you go, the more similar these different “kinds” of animals get.
If we try to get really scientific, it gets even more difficult to differentiate “kind”. Let’s throw out physical apperance since it can lead to false groupings (like calling a whale a fish). Let’s look just at DNA. The problem there, is that animals don’t group all that well according to DNA similarities. How diffent does a monkey’s DNA have to be from an ape in order for it to be a monkey? The best you can do is come up with a series of DNA relationships and say things like: Chimps and Gorillas share more DNA with humans that either three of those speices share with a given monkey species. That’s because the tree of life is more of a continuum than a series of distinct boxes.
We put all these different species in their own boxes, and then we find out that tigers really can mate with lions and prduce fertile offspring. They don’t do this in the wild, and so we still call them distinct species, but we get to see how the continuum manifests itself even today. Lions and tigers shared a common ancestor not that long ago, and although they look quite different, the DNA doesn’t know that. Then we find out that some animals can mate not only across the species barrier, but across the genus barrier as well. Nature doesn’t care what we call one species or one genus. Those are human constructs and don’t necesarily reflect the underlying physical reality. We try to make those constructs as anchored to the real world as possible, but in the end they are nothing more than our way of classifying things.
The comments about Neanderthal men mae me think of something. I very recently read a recent issue of some magazine that was entirely devoted to Neanderthals. Amongst the articles one was about how Neanderthals were perceived after their discovery, during the second half of the 19th century. Very interesting, actually, because it dispelled a number of mistaken assumptions about what the scientific community thought by then, and amongst other things, the idea that evolutionists of the time used it as an evidence, and anti-evolutionists dismissed it. According to the article at least, it’s patently untrue.
Anyway, I did not intend to sum up the article, but to mention a short sentence written like in passing by the author. He said basically that towards the end of the 19th century, anti-evolutionism wasn’t anymore a defensible position in the scientific community given the evidences accumulated at this point.
