Where are all the apes leading up to humans?

Welcome to EvC CrytoGod.If you do not realize yet, you will soon find out that the long term members here are well experienced in the use of PRATTs (points refuted a thousand times) and quote mining by creationists.Your sources for this are known by another moniker as "bearing false witness."For example: This is covered by Talk Origins under Index to Creationist Claims as point CC030.

quote:

---

Claim CC030:
All known fossils of ancient humans would fit on a billiard table (or in a coffin).
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 202.

​

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, 86.
Response:

​

That may have been true at one time, but there are thousands of hominid fossils now. Lubenow (1992) found that there were fossils from almost 4,000 hominid individuals catalogued as of 1976. As of 1999, there were fossils of about 150 Homo erectus individuals, 90 Australopithecus robustus, 150 Australopithecus afarensis, 500 Neanderthals, and more (Handprint 1999). Foley (2004) lists some of the more prominent fossils.

​

It takes only a handful of fossils to show that hominid forms have changed over time.

---

That lie is going to take an awfully big billiard table under this gravitational field and law of repose.Additionally quoting Gould as if he was against the concept of evolution is clear out-of-context mining as pretty much everyone here knows he was making the case for punctuated equilibrium, not creationism.Well, it seems to me you have one of two choices, either stay and learn from this site or other reliable sources or remain forever deceitful about and ignorant of the massive evidence, it's up to you.In the meantime, you won't be fooling virtually anyone here as to your sources, been there, done that.

Please feel free to elaborate. I personally see no purported "huge gap." Seems to me great apes have the same number of bones in the same places, the same organs performing the same functions - indeed even the same vestiges performing the same little to no function, similar social structures compared to non-civilized humans, crap they even walk upright more than virtually any other mammal.The DNA is even extremely similar. Sure the chromosome count is 48 instead of 46 but that chromosome 2 in humans is clearly a fusion of two chromosomes existing in the great apes. That chromosome even has a suppressed stop code in the middle. Read Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species In 23 Chapters for further details.Please back up your claims with evidence, that's the way it works here.Edited by anglagard, : clarification as to specificsEdited by anglagard, : Add chromosome evidence.

Hi, CrytoGod.Welcome to EvC!Your position baffles me. Do you dispute the evidence that there once were creatures on this planet that fit into the gap between humans and chimpanzees? For example, do you dispute the existence or veracity of the "Lucy" skeleton, which has characteristics intermediate between humans and chimpanzees?If you do dispute this, perhaps we could start a discussion about the nature of this evidence and why we think it supports evolution: there are many knowledgeable people here who could give you a very thorough explanation, if you'd like one. Or, you could read about it here, for starters.If you do not dispute this, then I have to ask, are you only questioning why they should be extinct? I am curious to know why you think a living organism would fill an evolutionary "gap" better than an extinct one.

First of all, god damn it that this thread already got to 2 pages before I even looked at the OP for the first time.Your question demonstrates a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. Don't worry, most people have the same misconception as you do. So, let's go slow.First of all, you need to understand that the smallest biological unit to be able to evolve is a population. Individuals can't evolve. Families can't evolve. It takes a whole population of individuals to evolve.Forget everything you've seen in movies like Evolution starring that guy from the x-files or the underworld franchise. Evolution takes many many many steps and many many millions of years to have any effect that would be noticable.So, let's zoom in and look at a population in a short amount of time. Suppose we have a population of googoogaga. A googoogaga is a species of flightless birds that live on an island near the lost continent of Atlantis. One day, an individual googoogaga is born with a genetic mutation that makes his head slightly larger than other males. When he grows up, he is able to use his head to knock out competitive males and so he's able to mate with more females.2 million years later, it is now instintual for googoogagas to fight each other with their heads to compete for females. Where are all the googoogagas that didn't have big heads? Did they die off? No. They just simply failed to produce offsprings over many generations and thus that trait no longer exist in googoogagas.Then the inhabitants of Atlantist experiment with fusion weapons and conviniently blows up the continent, sending millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere. Surrounding areas face extended periods of winter. Plant life begins to perish.Having a big head actually requires a lot of energy to maintain. So, over many generations, googoogagas with big heads can't eat enough food because of the long winters and so googoogagas with smaller heads begin to flourish over the ones with big heads.I hope you're following me here. The point is evolution happens fluidly over long periods of time and that entire populations evolve, not just any single groups of individuals. Unless a populations are separated by geography or whatever else, they will continue to interbreed and evolve together.What I just described above is just 1 dimension of evolution. There are many dimensions. I highly encourage you to start reading and take courses. Like everything else in life, it's not as simple as posing a single question expecting a life changing answer.I'm an engineer. I sure hope nobody will ever ask me how I go about designing a steel frame. I can't even begin to describe the process to a non-engineer and not have them all confused.

Tried but couldn't resist...

quote:

---

Don't take my word for it, let's read what the scientists say:

---

To begin with, as has been said already, using thirty year old sources doesn't cut it in real science. That's ancient history. Ten years is old when writing a thesis for an art history degree, let alone the ever moving world of cutting edge science. Get with the program.I also believe you should investigate your sources better...

quote:

---

Mark Ridley, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." New Scientist, June, 1981, p.831

---

31 years old.This is actually used as an example of quote mining on rationalwiki. Googling it gives you a list of creationist webvomit a mile long - all the same. Note that the sentence always left out by the creationist sites is "This does not mean that the theory of evolution is unproven."

quote:

---

John Reader (photo-journalist and author of "Missing Links"), "Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus?" New Scientist, 26 March 1981, p. 802

---

21 years old.I got beaten to this one so I'll leave it alone. Message 16

quote:

---

"A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib, ...He [Dr. T. White] puts the incident on par with two other embarrassing [sic] faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man,' the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'.

​

"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone.'"

​

"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". Henry Gee?, Return to the Planet of the Apes?, Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131

---

11 years old.It's funny - I usually see other stuff by Gee quote mined.Of course you do realise that the fact that anthropologists make mistakes doesn't invalidate the science in any way. Science has built in systems to weed out errors and hoaxes. Religions generally have built in systems to treat ancient traditions as the only truth and may bend reality to suit them. All evidence is open to interpretation. This is called science. The thing to remember is that it needs to be interpreted with the help of supporting evidence, not misrepresentation and outright lies.

quote:

---

The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record.
R. A. Raff and T. C. Kaufman, Embryos, Genes and Evolution: The Developmental Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 34

---

21 years old.As above. Of course our knowledge is incomplete. Do you seriously expect us to have found an record of every living thing that ever existed? This is not evidence against homonid evolution and it is such a broad statement that is not really evidence of anything.It's a good thing that genetics does such a good job of backing up the theory that the fossil record is superfluous. It is, however strong supporting evidence and also really cool.

quote:

---

In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.
(Ridley, Mark, Who doubts evolution? New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831.

---

Still 31 years old.I can't believe you used the same PRATT again. Could this be considered a PRATT fall?Please, please, read what you are posting. Don't just cut and paste this on here and expect us to take it seriously.

quote:

---

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.
Gould, Stephen J., ‘Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?’ Paleobiology, Vol. 6(1), January 1980, p. 127.

---

32 years old.This is another classic quote mine. Once you read the quote in context, you should see what I mean. If not, I, and I'm sure many others will be happy to help. The Quote Mine Project is a wonderful thing and I hope you make it your friend.

quote:

---

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors: it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’
Steven Jay Gould (Harvard University), Evolution’s erratic pace, Natural History 86(5):14, May 1977.

---

35 years old. Wow! That's as old as Star Wars!Oh, look. Another quote mine. What a surprise.In this one, Gould is supporting his idea of punctuated equilibrium, not showing that evolution is false.

quote:

---

Many evolutionary biologists since Darwin’s time, and even Darwin himself, have been struck by how few sequences of fossils have ever been found that clearly show a gradual, steady accumulation of small changes in evolutionary lineages. Instead, most fossil species appear suddenly, without transitional forms, in a layer of rock and persist essentially unchanged until disappearing from the record of rocks as suddenly as they appeared.
Campbell, et al., Biology Concepts and Connections, 3rd Ed., p 290, 2000.

---

12 years old.Sigh. Another one? Most fossils. There is a tendency for species to hang around for a while and then die out. What a shocking revelation. This is why Gould argued for punctuated equilibrium.

quote:

---

In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found - yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.
Dr. David M. Raup (U. of Chicago - Field Museum), Evolution and the Fossil Record, Science, Vol. 213 (July 17, 1981), p. 289.

---

31 years old.Once again, talking about the fact that humans are fallible does nothing to support your point.

quote:

---

Dr. Richard Leakey?, discoverer of Skull 1470 (Homo habilis), one of world’s foremost paleo-anthropologists,said in a PBS documentary in 1990:
If pressed about man’s ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving.

---

22 years old.I love this one and Leakey's response In his own words... Enough said

quote:

---

Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether.
Henry Gee, Return to the Planet of the Apes, Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.

---

Still 11 years old.Henry? Again?I'm getting tired of this now, so I'll just say that the rest of them have already been addressed using examples above.Special mention goes to the second Leakey quote, which weighs in at 39 years old!From the beginning...

quote:

---

I am aware that there is a dispute about the hominid fossils and its interpretations.

---

It would appear that the greatest dispute would be where creationists get their facts from and why are they so willing to lie to people about this. Why does it scare them so?

quote:

---

I find it quite funny that they all just so happen to be extinct. Evolutionists will give ad hoc explanations for why it is so. It's one of the many reasons why I doubt their evolution story.

---

I find it absolutely hilarious that you would actually present any of this as evidence at all. You have not given any cogent argument as to why other hominids should still be alive according to the ToE. No reason at all to assume this at all.Maybe you should also be asking why the coelocanth order has living representatives , while tiktaalik is extinct.Now, show us some actual evidence so that we have something to talk about. Why shouldn't the other hominids be extinct?

quote:

---

Please don't post ad hoc explanations with no scientific evidence to back up it up.

---

Edited by Warthog, : Typos. I hate typos

Hi CryptoGod,Thank you for that cut-n-paste from Attention Required! | Cloudflare or wherever else copies also exist. Were I to give as much time and thought composing my reply as you did I'd have to close now.You asked why there were no *living* hominid species more closely related to us than chimps and bonobos. That you said "living" implied that you understood that those more closely related are extinct. But now I can see that you don't accept that these extinct hominid species are related to us, so now you appear to be asking a different question. You appear to be asking why is the gap between chimps/bonobos and humans so large?But if you do not accept that the extinct hominid species are related to us, why do you accept that chimps and bonobos are related to us when they resemble us even less?There can be no specific evidence-based scientific answers for why most species went extinct, because the evidence just doesn't exist. We understand the causes of extinction and can engage in informed speculation, but that is as far as we can go. I don't even know why my Great Uncle Meier's line went extinct (other than the obvious "he failed to reproduce"), I can't imagine how we would ever determine why a couple million years ago the last australopithecine failed to produce descendants.At one point you asked for scientific evidence that 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct. The Wikipedia article on Extinction Events provides a slightly different figure: And it provides this reference: And the Wikipedia article on Extinction provides yet another figure: And it provides these references: I happen to own that last reference, and here's a brief excerpt: The technical paper by Mark Newman can be found here: A Mathematical Model for Mass Extinction. An excerpt: Newman has also written the book Models of Extinction: A Review with R. G. Palmer, and chapter 2 is a detailed review of the data that went into formulation of extinction models and that provides support for the 99.9% figure.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

It doesn't matter how old the quotes are if there are no more recent statements from scientists who say otherwise. Moreover not all the quotes are 30 years or older.If you claim they are lies or taken out of context then prove it.Scientists expected to find gradual transitions in the fossil record (hence the quotes).So evolutionists can't even use the sub humans became extinct explanation when there is no solid scientific evidence they existed. It is well known the fossil record doesn't support their story and that is why they conjured up the ad hoc explanation punctuated equilibrium to cover up their failed expectation.Evolution is a funny 'theory'. It explains everything with just-so stories and ad hoc explanations which means it explains nothing.Edited by CrytoGod, : Spelling error

I checked the context of the Gould quote and it wasn't taken out of context.

And I think this sums up exactly how much effort you put into your posts.

Okay, but I still don't see any scientific evidence the claim that 98% or 99% of all species have become extinct. Perhaps you may want to point out exactly where the scientific evidence can be found in your references? Thank you.

Hi CryptoGod,I wasn't sure what level of detail you were looking for, so I provided information at different levels. The greatest amount of detail was provided by Newman's book Models of Extinction: A Review, it had fairly clear descriptions and even included presentations of data like this: This book rolls up a great deal of information from many papers, so if you'd like to see the papers containing the data he used there's a long list of references at the end beginning on page 45.I'm not trying to debate the percentage of extinct species with you, I just thought since you asked about it that you'd like to see some additional information. Is this somehow relevant to your contentions about human ancestry?I'm still not sure what question you're asking. Are you asking why the gap between chimps/bonobos and humans is so large? And if so, then if you do not accept that the extinct hominid species are related to us, why do you accept that chimps and bonobos are related to us when they resemble us even less?Also, you didn't give any indication whether you understood the explanation about the lack of evidence making it impossible to know in any specific way why a species went extinct. Did the explanation make sense?--Percy

Hello CrytoGod, and welcome to EvC! What do you mean? Fossils of early humanoids that were found aren't evidence that these humanoids existed? What else could they be evidence for?

Precisely what are you willing to accept as "scientific evidence?" Do you expect Percy's reference to have a listing of all of the billions of species estimated to have existed on Earth throughout history? Do you require documentation of a specific fossil for every species that is believed to have ever existed, despite the fact that fossilization is an extremely rare event and many organisms (including bacteria and other single-celled organisms) simply do not leave fossils? Are you willing to accept a mathematical extrapolation from the number of known species from the fossil record? Given that the number is in fact an "estimate," will you immediately challenge the admitted imprecision of the number, even though it's likely to be accurate, regardless of Percy's response? Do you even understand the difference between precision and accuracy, or will you conflate the two in an attempt to "prove" that the imprecision of an estimate means it's somehow likely to be inaccurate in its entirety?What if only 90% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct? Would your argument change? Would it change at 80%? At 50%? Because even if it's an absurdly low number like 10%, we know that our hominid ancestors are all extinct, even though it's extremely unlikely to find evidence for a specific cause for the extinction of a specific species. Does the manner of extinction particularly matter when determining whether those hominid ancestors were actually the ancestors of modern humanity? Does it matter whether a branch of our ancient cousins were killed off in a natural disaster because they all lived in a single geographic area, or whether they were simply out-competed by a new branch of the family tree? What's the relevance?Is there some reason that you think that reversing the typical "if humans descended from apes, why are there still apes" argument into the equally vapid "if humans are descended from apes, why are all the human-ancestor apes extinct" is particularly clever? Why do you think that the Theory of Evolution requires ancestor species to survive to be contemporary with all of their descendants? By that logic, you should be asking "if birds descended from dinosaurs, why aren't there any dinosaurs living today?" After all, we don't see "sub-birds" and "sub-sub-birds" flapping their not-quite-flight-capable wings around today either. I wouldn't expect to, but for some reason you seem to. Why?Perhaps a more obvious metaphor would be useful. "How come there is no members of my family tree more like me than my cousins? Why is there such a huge gap? You would expect to find all of our shared ancestors like parents and grandparents and great-grandparents leading up to me, right? All of my family before me from my father to my grandfather to my great-great grandfather should be walking around."The fact that most of my ancestors are dead has no logical bearing on whether or not my cousins and second-cousins and other more distant relatives who still breathe are actually related to me.Why then do you believe that the ancestors of our species must be alive to prove our relation to the distant cousins of humanity that are alive today?

So do you have any evidence that punctuated equilibrium is incorrect?It is the nature of science to work toward increased accuracy. So the increase in accuracy that the idea of punctuated equilibrium provides is now used by creationists to denigrate science? Bit of a double standard, eh?By the way, one of my Ph.D. subjects (a while back) was fossil man so don't plan on pulling any hats out of your rabbit.

There is solid evidence. It's called the fossil record. Fossils are solid. That's not well-known, that's merely widely believed. By creationists. Who made it up.I'm afraid they've been lying to you. They do that.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.