EvC Forum: Searching for Truth with a Broken Flashlight

Hi Jeff,

You have a lot on your plate already, so I thought I would just address a couple of points. I hope Bluejay doesn't mind my cutting in.

Hawley writes:

Biological evolution does not say we came from monkeys or chimps.

Bluejay writes:

No, it doesn’t. But, the evidence does. This is only a way to comfort people who want to accept evolution but also want to believe that humans didn’t evolve.

Jeff Davis writes:

Sadly, you are wrong. The evidence conforms to Hawley's comment.

A number of people have mentioned this already, but you don't seem to want to hear the fact that Hawley is wrong here. We are evolved from monkeys, or at least, from creatures very like monkeys.

We are not evolved from chimps. Chimps and humans diverged long after (chimps+humans+other apes) diverged from monkeys.

We are not evolved from modern monkeys. Modern monkeys and apes do share common ancestry though. That common ancestor would not be any species of monkey living today. It would though, have been a small, tailed primate very much like a modern monkey. In short, it seems reasonable to call such a creature a monkey. It was a small, tailed primate; not a lemur. That pretty much makes it a monkey. It would certainly have looked enough like a monkey that no layman could hope to tell it apart from one.

If we could summon up the last common ancestor of modern humans, apes and monkeys and put it in a zoo, it would belong in the monkey house.

All the evidence - fossil, genetic, whatever - confirms this view.

Your Mr Hawley has got the wrong end of the stick.

Jeff writes:

I will make one quick comment, Darwin never used the word "evolution" in his first four editions and only in his last edition did he use the word "evolved".

You are wrong. The following text is from the 1859 First Edition of Origin;

Charles Darwin writes:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

That's the 1859 edition remember. If you doubt me, you can look it up right here;

http://darwin-online.org.uk/..._PC-Virginia-Francis-F373.pdf

Now this strikes me as a fairly trivial point. Nonetheless, you seem to be very stubborn about it. You're wrong mate. Hawley was wrong. Accept it. Get over it.

Mutate and Survive

Edited by Granny Magda, : For want of a comma...

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