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Author | Topic: "If I descended from an ape, how come apes are still here?" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 8487 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 2.5
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I've been puzzling over how to better answer this question.
it's an infuriating question because once you understand the answer it's obvious and simple but it's a perennial - it just won't go away. The reason it won't is because evolution is not understood by most people and ignorant religionists repeat this supposedly slam dunk question over and over. I read on a thread on this site what I thought was a really good start to an answer that can be understood by anyone - I just wanted to flesh it out and develop the full picture. Edit - this is the latest version, May 2012.
Edited by Tangle, : Providing most recent story
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Admin Director Posts: 12788 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Thread copied here from the "If I descended from an ape, how come apes are still here?" thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 286 days) Posts: 16112 Joined: |
My reply usually goes something like this:
"If Iceland was colonized by Scandinavians, why are there still Scandinavians?" Obviously just because one branch of the primates started to occupy a new niche, that doesn't make the old niche uninhabitable any more than some Scandinavians moving to Iceland made Scandinavia uninhabitable. Why should it? --- Of course, one could always talk about the actual meaning of the word "ape" and about cladistics but I think there's a time and a place for everything and that probably isn't it.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17167 Joined: Member Rating: 3.7 |
My answer is "if I'm descended from my grandfather, how can I have cousins?"
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Tangle Member Posts: 8487 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Both the 'why do I still have cousins?' and 'why are there still Scandinavians?' questions help generally as opening comments, but they really only impress those of us that already get it.
I'm trying to pull together a more complete explanation so that someone for whom the idea is both new and difficult can understand. There are plenty of people that are entirely puzzled by it but are prepared to try. One obvious thing you'd see straight away as you walked down the human line would be the height and age of the mothers - they would get progressively shorter and younger wouldn't they? On the chimp line, nothing much would change except over millennium. Anyone know off-hand where the parallel lines meet - pan prior? - what it would look like and where it would live? (Meanwhile, Google is my friend..) abe
http://arcana.wikidot.com/pan-prior Edited by Tangle, : Updated with Pan Prior info.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 259 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
Well, this depends who you are and what time period you're speaking. Given that you contrasted it to millenia for the chimps, I guess you mean a time span of centuries. Not all populations of humans have gotten bigger over the last century or so, and the change isn't going to continue indefinitely into the past. You'd probably find a fluctuating height, due to individual variation, changes in nutrition as lifestyle changes, and changing ethnicity. The idea that humans were all shorter, then 20th century nutrition suddenly shot them up in height is dubious. An analysis of the 43 people buried at a mass grave near the Battle of Towton (1461, for those whose British history isn't so hot) showed that their height varied from 1.5 to 1.8 metres tall. This puts them in the range of average height for English men today, and leaves the average a bit taller than men in 18th century England. These things vary.
I think a lot more would change than you think. We have a tendency to underestimate the level of diversity in other apes, but not all chimps are the same size, and their skin varies in colour. You'd probably find racial shifts in the chimp population as much as in the human one.
Now that's a difficult question to answer, except for the 'where would it live' bit, and there I have no idea except 'Africa'. Not sure any of this helps!
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Taq Member Posts: 8519 Joined:
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This goes hand in hand with another creationist misconception which I will talk about further at the bottom of the post. It all comes down to not understanding the implications of descent with modification. It might help to go further down the clade and walk them down the evolutionary timeline along with a link to tolweb.org (which I think is a good resource for these types of debates). Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that was an ape, and they are both still apes. Humans and lemurs share a common ancestor that was a primate, and they are both still primates. Humans and bears share a common ancestor that was a mammal, and they are both still mammals. Humans and trout share a common ancestor that was a vertebrate, and they are both still vertebrates. Humans and amoeba share a common ancestor that was a eukaryote, and they are both still eukaryotes. You could even slice it up even more, showing the relationships within bilateria, deuterosomes, etc. Each tolweb page has a link for the containing group which is something you can always point to. The important point is that evolution does not produce something totally different as many creationists think. Too often I have seen creationists asking why we do not observe the evolution of a completely different species. The answer is that this is not how evolution works. You are what your ancestors were, PLUS MODIFICATIONS. Evolution is descent with modification, not evolution of something completely different.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Wrong. The cause of the confusion is that the questioner is an easily confused idiot. "How come apes are still here?" is an inane question on many levels. First, humans are apes. Second, the particular ape that is the actual common ancestor of humans and chimps is extinct. Third, even a fool can see that humans don't compete with other with other primates by trying to fill the same niche. The flip responses given by Dr. Adequate, PaulK, and others in this thread ought to be sufficient to see that the question misses the mark. Someone who cannot see that the question is facially ridiculous given those answers is never going to understand a more detailed answer. Don't waste your time.
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Tangle Member Posts: 8487 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Hmm - that's interesting and a little disappointing :-) Could it be that those involved in the battle were warriors and therefore larger? I really don't want to believe that all those medieval buildings had doorways too small for the people living in them! Is there any evidence that modern man gets taller with improved nutrition? Are Asians in fast developing countries like India and China getting taller?
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Tangle Member Posts: 8487 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Ah, but you've grown cynical and case hardened; I'm new here and haven't had to give the same answer a thousand times yet ;-) I've also seen the genuine puzzlement and and also interest when they're presented with the argument for the first time. Some of them have never heard the other side of this at all or even given it a thought before. And, bless 'em, a lot aren't very bright or used to thinking about ideas and concepts. They deserve a proper answer.
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Son Member (Idle past 3065 days) Posts: 346 From: France,Paris Joined: |
Well, I didn't look for studies but I'm Vietnames as is most of my family, those who stayed back in Vietnam are much shorter than me, my brother or the cousins who live in France. I'm 1.75 meter tall and my family members that are born in France are around this height whereas those who live in Vietnam are around 10-20 centimeters shorter.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Perhaps becoming hardened does not take overly long. I generally agree that proper answers are best. But this particular question, (and the question of how Venus and Neptune can have retrograde rotation if all matter was created in the big bang) really irk me.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17167 Joined: Member Rating: 3.7 |
The point of the answer is partly to indicate how silly the question is and partly to draw the questioner out. You can't answer the misconceptions underlying the question until you know what they are. And then you can explain that the evolutionary tree is very like a patrilineal (or matrilineal) family tree, with branches constantly splitting off.
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Coragyps Member Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
A couple of points:
- We don't know much about the details of what we would see down the chimp line. They were forest-dwellers, and things don't fossilize as well in forests as they do in the savannahs where the human line largely lived. - Your picture doesn't make explicit that the far-end mommies on each line are holding hands with their single mommy. This little bit may well be best saved for after you already have your correspondent agreeing that the lines each change as you go back in time, but it does need to be stated emphatically at some point in the conversation.
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Tangle Member Posts: 8487 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Yeh, that's disappointing. It leaves my argument a little naked. Then I hit the imaginary Pan prior and I have to explain a bloody 'missing link'. The two final offspring holding the hands of the same mother where the two parallel lines cross is, of course, the punchline. But I'm missing the actual mother....
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