Why are there no human apes alive today?

Of course, "cool looking" in an evolutionary sense often means "I'm a healthy individual and can give you many strong babies." Traits that are selected for in choosing a mate - bright colors, big horns, huge plumage, loud croaking - can all attest to a suitor's, well, suitability.Also, thanks for mentioning a point that traste seems to be trying very hard not to understand: success = reproductive success. Nothing else matters to natural selection except passing on the genes. The notion that organisms somehow strive to become more "advanced," like Windows upgrades or cell phones, is fundamentally wrong.

And when read in context, as you yourself can do if you just go back to anglagard's Message 186, you'll see that Darwin is hardly advocating or approving of this prediction. And, sadly, he appears to have been correct.Edited by ZenMonkey, : Misspelled anglagard's name.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

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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

Are you self-Moosing?/off topic

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

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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

Probably not, but you're only thinking of these things as important because human beings can do them. (Sorta.) Asserting that this makes human beings "more evolved" in the sense of "better than everyone else" is like asserting that Willie Mays had a much better batting average than Beethoven. Well, yeah, but so what? In terms of evolutionary success as measured by longevity and adaptability, pond scum wins out over human beings by a huge margin.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

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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

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.

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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

Actually, I've read fairly persuasive arguments that its only an inflated self-image that prevents us from classifying ourselves and the two species of chimpanzee in the same genus, giving us Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes, and Homo paniscus. We three chimps are much more closely related than some organisms that we put into different genera.See The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond and this recent article from the National Geographic

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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

You appear to be replying to Nuggin's Message 232, instead of what I was discussing in my own Message 242. This tends to make me think that just like Portlllo, you're not actually reading any replies. Sad.Since my post had absolutely nothing to do with ambulocetus natans, I won't address the details of that line of argument. I'll just point out that the simple assertion that natans and crocodiles are "almost identical" isn't evidence. As Nuggin pointed out, they may have superficial similarities, but show significant anatomical differences. The average guy might not be able to tell the difference between an iguana and a cat just by looking at the skeletons, but the folks who go to school for years and get their paychecks for knowing this stuff certainly can. Common sense doesn't always count for much.Your issue with the classification of Neanderthals seems to be that science revises its understanding of things whenever new evidence arises. I fail to see the problem.Now, if you'd like to discuss what I was actually saying in Message 242 about misunderstanding the term "evolved" to mean "better than" or "more advanced," I'd be happy to do so.

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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

The whole thing comes down to misunderstanding "more evolved"' to mean "better or more advanced than" rather than using it correctly to describe the genetic distance between two organisms, whether comparing two contemporaneous species, or a species and its ancestral form.

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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

One well-evidenced hypothesis that I subscribe to is that Homo sapiens has a habit of exterminating our nearest relatives. We polished off H. Neanderthalis and a pack of other species in our genus a while back, and are almost done with the rest of the great apes.You still seem to be asking: "If I'm still alive, why are all of my great-grandparents' cousins dead?" Think about it.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

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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

You have it backwards. What evidence do you have that human beings aren't apes and properly classified as such, other than saying, "Well, they look different to me" and pointing out that we humans have cell phones and shoes, and chimpanzees don't? Genes and taxonomy say that we're apes - significantly different in behavioral terms, it's true, but apes just the same if you apply the same standards that we use to classify other organisms.

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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

Good analogy. I'll also point out that in your travel back in time along the lineage of a language, you'll never find anything like Latin-speaking parents waking up one day to find their children all speaking French.

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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

I'm about to call a Poe here.A number of forum participants have already explained why we don't find living examples of what you seem to think of as an intermediate human species. (And explained. And explained.) It would actually be an unexpected surprise if we did find a living H. ergaster hiding out in some remote area. As has been pointed out, human beings have forced our way into every ecological niche we could, not leaving room for anything else that was there first. All our close relatives are gone, and I expect that all the other ape species will be extinct within my lifetime. (And I'm almost 50, so that's not so long, is it?)To use the example of another genus, if we weren't around to take care of them, our friend Canis familiaris, the humble ol' dog, would most likely either be driven into extinction within a few generations by their cousins the wolf (C. lupus) and the coyote (C. latrans), or they would interbreed with them and be reabsorbed. The niche that dogs would try to fill in nature has already been taken by relatives who are better adapted. Sorry, guys, no room for you.Or to use the language analogy again, what you're saying is something like: "I won't believe that Modern English descended from Anglo-Saxon unless you can find someone who speaks Middle English today."ABE: Which, by the way, means that you are quite, quite wrong.Edited by ZenMonkey, : No reason given.

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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

Define "kind."

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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

Okay. How exactly do you determine one kind from another?Here, lets try some examples. Could you tell me which of the following are different kinds and which are the same?1. A dog and a wolf. 2. A macaw and a cockatoo. 3. Vibrio cholerae and E. coli 4. A termite and a cockroach 5. A tiger and a cheetah What standard or method do you use to determine kinds, and how specifically do you use that standard or method to determine whether something is (by your definition) an ape or a human being?Edited by ZenMonkey, : Couldn't spell "macaw."

If I remember correctly, the practice of knowingly asserting falsehoods in a debate goes by the name of "arguing in bad faith."It's possible that Portillo actually hasn't understood that the facts he's used to support his position have been refuted. He could ask for a clarification, but that hasn't happened, and I think that any reasonable person would have to admit that the evidence has been explained clearly enough. Or Portillo could have rebutted with either a clarification of his own position or additional supporting evidence, but that hasn't happened either.So I'll also have to agree that he's arguing in bad faith, which essentially means that the debate is over.

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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