Why are there no human apes alive today?

No, not really... How so? By what mechanism?What about things like these: There's plenty of other apes around that give us a glimpse into the rise of mankind and the fossil record clearly shows an evolutionary path. The representations aren't relied on for anything. Like orangutans? It litterally translates into "forest man"... I mean, look at this guy: How is that NOT an "ape-man"?

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?

Oh, just a little pedantry for the sake of brevity, Paul I'm not interested in how Portillo is wrong, I used the General Reply to seperate my point from his misunderstandings.Everybody's really digging their heels in on this absolute claim of "no such thing as more evolved" and, I think that it can be seen as technically incorrect. Evolution *is* change...Hey, I see here where Percy has been making this same point, Message 214:

quote:

---

But there is yet another way of looking at it in which you are correct. If you measure the percent of difference between the common ancestor and pond scum, and also for the common ancestor and human beings, then there would likely be a much greater difference with human beings.

---

I don't see a problem with that, in particular.

---

In Message 249, frako writes: Yes! Exactly. That seems like it'd be something you'd have to measure for the individuals, rather than the population like we should be considering.

---

In Message 250, Tag writes: I don't think so. Stasis is a lack of evolution. The more static a species is, the less it is evolving, imho. Is that really just wrong?

Not necessarily, if the decendents of that extinct transition still exist then it would still be a transitional even thought that particular form of the species no longer exists.The exception to the tranistionals would be species that went extinct and didn't have any decendents at all.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : typos

In addition to the help Percy provided you in Message 255, I think its worth pointing out that images have to already be hosted somewhere on the internet. You can't post images from your harddrive without going through a hosting service.Places like Imgur: The magic of the Internet, or Photobucket, or... well there's all kinds of image hosting websites out there.

Ah yes, I didn't notice that you were talking about transition forms while I was thinking of transitional species.Archy might not be a transitional species, but it is still a transitional form.Good point.

Can you at least admit that Biblical Creationists have the same amount of evidence for their version of creation as the Pastafarians do?

I'm talking about the end results. Can't we say that some species have been influenced more than others? That they've gone through more changes?Haven't whales gone through more changes than some fish?Random thought: On a totally different aspect, what about species that are better adapted to their particular niche? Couldn't describing that as being more evolved to that niche make sense? What I'd be judging is the output of number. The more varience between the numbers, the more random they would be. Like, 1-2-2-1-1, would be less random than 3-6-1-5-2. Or does that not make any sense at all? I realize that its the same process, but couldn't the end result be described as such? Yes! I do think that is a better word to use in this scenario. It would at least result in less confusion. That's actually a really good point... in that there'd have to be some selective pressure to maintain the statis from being overridden by genetic drift. I hadn't thought of that. That kinda ties in to my random thought above, in that being better adapted to a niche might be a result of avoiding change.On the other hand, what about a species that, for whatever reason, did not experience as much mutation as normal, and also had very little selective pressure. If the genome remained relatively unchanged for a long time, despite selective pressure, wouldn't it make sense to say that it isn't evolving as much? I realize that's stretching but I'm just exploring here.Thanks for chiming in.

Alrighty then.Well, having the phrase "more derived" to better describe the concept than "more evolved" does will work for me, so thanks again for the replies.I'm convinced that "more evolved" isn't good phraseology so I'll replace it with "more derived" in the future.

Manatees, Emus, Pinguins, etc. Message 194 never got a reply... Holy shit, you can read minds!?That is so cool.

This might be too far of an aside, but if humans didn't evolve from another species, then how did we get here? I know the answer is God did it, but how? Did we just magically appear fully formed one day? There's no way that could work...

Message 196

Yeah, transitional ones. I can't show a picture of an animal in the future...And this exposes one of the issues with your "there's no transitionals today" assertion. Transitionals are between one thing and another, so any animal of today doesn't yet have the other form into which is transitioning because that's going to be in the future. Clearly, the animals are in an "in-between" stage... A bird that can't fly, a lizard without legs, a sea-cow with a flipper in the back. If you won't accept anything as a transitional then your claim of there not being any is dubious and hallow. That you talk to birds explains a lot, actually At least they have a model and a theory. Your "researchers" have nothing at all but unsubstantiated assertions. Mindless drivel...

Not the exact thing you mention, but close enough:\There's also this use of tools in the wild:Pretty damn impressive.

But of course, you're just making up bullshit