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Author | Topic: Why are there no human apes alive today? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
jar Member (Idle past 422 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
I was measuring success by how long the critter has been around and how it has successfully survived so many changing filters. If someday the cockroach is gone and humans still around, I'm more than happy to change my position.
Not I did not say more evolved, simply more successful. Edited by jar, : fix subtitle Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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ZenMonkey Member (Idle past 4539 days) Posts: 428 From: Portland, OR USA Joined: |
Portillo writes: So every living and perhaps non living thing are all 100% equally evolved? Have you read any of the replies to your messages so far? There is no such thing as "more or less evolved." Evolution is change over time. That's all. You can talk about how closely or distantly two different organisms are from their common ancestor. For example, we're more closely related to chimpanzees than we are to chipmunks, but more closely related to chipmunks than we are to chickens. Or you can talk about how well something has adapted to its environment. Or you can compare how much change one organism has experienced since it diverged from the common ancestor it shares with another organism. For example, I would hazard a guess that we primates have gone through a few more changes than rats have since the Jurassic. Witness the thrinaxodon, one of the first mammal-type beast from back in the day:
Anyway, the point that everyone has been trying to make is that there is no ladder or chain of being or grades of development, nothing that really makes any one organism "superior" to another. There's just life, and all the different ways life has managed to express itself over time. Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs. -Theodoric Reality has a well-known liberal bias.-Steven Colbert I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.- John Stuart Mill
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DBlevins Member (Idle past 3804 days) Posts: 652 From: Puyallup, WA. Joined: |
Your measure is still arbitrary. Others might consider high taxonomic diversity to be a sign of success in evolution.
By your measure, the Coelacanth is a more successful creature than humans. Or horseshoe crabs, or nautiloids, or crocodiles. the fact is that we are JUST as successful as any species living today. Until we are not. By the way, I never said you said "more evolved" but you're still wrong in saying "more successful."
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jar Member (Idle past 422 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Okay, that is your opinion.
And I'd agree that all of the examples you mention are demonstrably more successful than humans. Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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bluescat48 Member (Idle past 4218 days) Posts: 2347 From: United States Joined: |
Good post and totally correct.
Particularly There is no such thing as "more or less evolved."
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Percy Member Posts: 22502 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Hi Mazzy,
Others have already responded to the portions of your post that appear to be misconstruals of both the evidence and processes of evolution, so I'll just mention that I wasn't advocating gradualism as the sole rate of evolution. I was making a different point. I guess I'm not sure how you're using the word "disappearance". I thought you were referring to missing intermediates in the fossil record, but you didn't detect that intermediates was my main point, so I guess you must have meant something else. Extinctions, perhaps? All species, one could even argue all individuals, are transitional. They're intermediate between what came before and what will come after. The pace of change, the tempo at which a species transitions to another species, the rate at which intermediate stages are traversed, does not affect this fact. Gould would completely agree that all species are transitional (except species that go extinct, of course), and so would everyone else in biology, and certainly everyone here in this thread except maybe you and Portillo. This is because reproduction is imperfect. No species ever breeds true because of copying mistakes during reproduction (genetic errors can pop up at other times too, but there's no need to descend into too much detail). The errors perpetuate and carry forward into following generations. Each generation is slightly different than the one before. Change is inevitable. Whether fast or slow, change will happen. By the way, like everyone else I'm wondering what on Earth moved you to say this:
What your research tells you is that humans are not related to any species of ape alive today. --Percy
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
Take two species today and their last common ancestor. Quanitfy the differences in genomes between the current species and the ancestor. The species with more changes to its genome is more evolved than the other.
Problema?
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AZPaul3 Member Posts: 8563 From: Phoenix Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Problema? Oh, yes. "More" change does not mean "more" evolved. It means evolved differently. The semantics between the two uses of the word "more" are key. In your case the useage is quantity. In Portillo's case the usage is direction, purpose, quality. Your usage can be seen as technically correct. Portillo's is most certainly not. The regulars here know you understand this, CS, so I have to question the quibble. Edited by AZPaul3, : afterthought
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frako Member (Idle past 334 days) Posts: 2932 From: slovenija Joined: |
The Amoeba has more gens then a human so comparing the changes that acured with our last common ancestor the first cell would make the amoeba more evolved then humans ???
The only way i see to measure how evolved something is would be to measure its reproductive success in a given environment. And i still doubt this method would be good enough.
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Taq Member Posts: 10084 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Take two species today and their last common ancestor. Quanitfy the differences in genomes between the current species and the ancestor. The species with more changes to its genome is more evolved than the other. More divergent does not equal more evolved. Selection of already existing features is as much evolution as selection of new features.
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Mazzy  Suspended Member (Idle past 4619 days) Posts: 212 From: Rural NSW, Australia Joined: |
Darls at the risk of being disrespectful you are free to consider your self an ape and no different than a chimp. I on the other hand reserve the right to say that my reasoning and perceptual abilities are very different to that of an ape.
It takes an evolutionists to line up a 5 primates, including humans, and say they cannot tell the difference and that the human is not the odd one out. This is a simple game really that most children over the age of 7 years can conceptualise and achieve successfully. Guess what...??...I can to. Too bad that you cannot..
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jar Member (Idle past 422 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Odds are that if they have been educated they can identify each of the different apes including the human ones.
Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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Mazzy  Suspended Member (Idle past 4619 days) Posts: 212 From: Rural NSW, Australia Joined: |
Oh good one dear...NOT.
I spoke to the fossils rather than the misrepresentation of ambulocetus natans One of the reasons I do not frequent here much is because I am unabe to post pictures, while others can. Do please source some pictures of the FOSSIL of ambulocetus natans and a picture of a crocodile fossil and you will see they are almost identical. Once again common sense must leave the buiding when discussing TOE. Rather than theorise natans is a variety of crocodile they have 'poofed' it into some intermediate that just looks like a crocodile. Now I will also remind you of the misrepresentations put forward for Neanderthal the ape man. It suited your evo sketch artists to represent Neanderthal this way. You had heaps of fossils also and still Neanderthal was an ape man. With all the science and fluffing around that is what these 'smart' ones came up with. However, with DNA retrieved from Neanderthal his has 'poofed' into a human not unlike us In fact many scientists classify Neanderthal as a subspecies of Homo sapiens. So it was not the fossils that made neanderthal human, it was not your scientists that could work this out from the fossils. The representation changed as a result of the DNA sequencing. Now you do not have DNA from natans. The representation has been likewise misrepresented. I note that I clearly spoke to the fossils/skeleton of natans being similar to a modern day crocodile. I wonder why you did not post these up? Answer: I am correct. Edited by Mazzy, : No reason given.
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Percy Member Posts: 22502 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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Hi Mazzy,
Ape (Hominoidea) is a classification that includes several different species. When we say that both humans and chimps are apes we only mean that they hold certain identifying characteristics in common. Saying that humans and chimps are both apes does not imply we're "no different than a chimp." If we were really the same as chimps then we'd be the same species, but we're not. We could modify the classification system so that chimps, gorillas and orangutans were in one group and humans in another, and in fact it was not uncommon to do that not so long ago, but that wouldn't change the characteristics we have in common with them, and that's all the classification of Apes is saying. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22502 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Mazzy writes: One of the reasons I do not frequent here much is because I am unabe to post pictures, while others can. Usually this will work pretty well, it's pretty standard at most discussion boards, except that here you can also specify the width, in this case I've set it to 300:
[img=300]http://www.superchrist.com/images/fish_black.gif[/img] That should give you this:
If you hover over the image you'll see a little magnifying glass with a "+" inside. Click on it to display the image at full size. Click on "peek" to see all the dBCodes and HTML of any message. The dBCodes are documented over at EvC Forum: dBCodes. --Percy
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