"If I descended from an ape, how come apes are still here?"

I came to the same conclusion yesterday, the analogy doesn't work - to be at all useful I would have to put it as "if cats descended from dogs, how come there are still dogs" - which is wrong on many levels.No, I'll have to go back to trying to explain that we and apes are both modern and do the cousins thing again. Frustrating.

Found this rather nice diagram, whilst pootling around. The numbers show the number of individuals as fossils that we've found.
(Dawkins is saying that chimps descended from Australopithecus africanus btw) http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html

How's this?

I have never reached a 'position' on evolution - or at least I didn't know I had.For me, as for most I suspect, there was no difference between the theory of evolution, the periodic table, Ohm's Law and Calculus. It was just a subject studied as fact like all others. I no more have a position on evolution than I do on the knee reflex. I find the whole religion vs Darwin thing bizarre.The people I'm talking to are not the kind that have 'positions' - they just haven't really thought about it much, if at all; but they've heard the silly arguments.This place is extreme, not everyone worries about this stuff.

Deep in there, you have a point - I'll tone down the science names.BUT it's dumb to assume that people who don't know anything about evolution are dumb. I know nothing about Homer but I assume that's because I never had to study him, not because I'm stupid.It may be the case that hyper-religious people are dumb (ie possibly 40% of all Americans) but in some other parts of the world it ain't like that.

Hard core creationists know this argument because we've told the story a hundred times - they just won't hear it.I'm not doing this for them, it's for those people who simply haven't thought about it but have heard and accepted the line 'if we come from apes......etc'. They then go about their daily lives and never think about it again until they meet someone like me on a bad day.I too think that image has a lot to answer for. It's persisted for 150 years.

I guess you missed post 60(I do worry about people who still quote Piltdown Man as a problem for evolution. Why anyone would think a Victorian fraud was relevant today I can't imagine. It's like saying that because scientists proved cold fusion to be wrong, physics is therefore wrong. Weird.)

Any better?

I think I've misinterpreted what Dawkins was saying here: Australopithecus - WikipediaCan you fix it for me?

Looks to me atm that the split was at least 4m years earlier - perhaps Toumai is the nearest I can get.Fossil Hominids: Toumai

It seems nothing is straightforward.I didn't make up the Gull story, it's originally from Mark Ridley 1985, p5 and reproduced in Daniel Dennet's Dangerous Ideas book.I guess they didn't have DNA to play with in 1985Thanks for keeping me honest.

haha, whilst researching the Toumai fossil, I clicked on an Answers in Genesis link for a bit of light relief and found this How could scientists have missed the 'proper' definition of a hominid for so long?

Ok, here's the final story (I haven't changed the ring species part) If we descended from apes, how come apes are still here?What’s wrong with this picture? Well nothing or pretty much everything — depending on what you think it shows.If you see it as man evolving from million year old ape-like ancestors, you’re right. But if you see it as a picture of how monkeys change into people, that’s probably why some people ask the question:If we descended from apes, how come apes are still here?To ask that question means that there’s a vital piece of information missing from the questioner’s understanding of what evolution is. That vital piece of information is the concept of the tree of life, that all things are related to each other.An evolution scientist on hearing that question will sigh deeply or change the subject quickly because religious fundamentalists regularly use it as a really bad argument against evolution.A more tolerant scientist may ask you a question back. Such as:"If Iceland was colonized by Scandinavians, why are there still Scandinavians?" Or"if I'm descended from my grandfather, how can I have cousins?"That’s something to think about because it does provided the answer. Meanwhile here’s fuller explanation.Chimpanzees are apes and one of our closest animal relatives - their scientific name is Pan troglodytes. Now, imagine that you are standing face to face with a chimpanzee - let’s call her Pan.Now imagine that with your left hand you are holding the hand of your mother and that your mother is holding the right hand of her mother and so on for thousands of generations back into the past. By doing this, you know as an absolute certainty that you are descended directly on your mother’s side to everyone in the chain.Imagine that Pan is doing the same but with her right hand.You now have two imaginary lines of women and female chimps holding hands going backwards in time - like a railway track with women and chimps lining each side.You can now walk down the centre of the rails and look carefully at your mother's family line and the chimp's family line going back millions of years.So what would do you see?Walking back about 200,000 years on the human side you see a mother who’s husband was a chap science named Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis ) she’s distinctly human, using tools and standing upright, probably hairless and very tall — the males are up to 7 feet tall. This is the first different species that we’ve come across in our chain. But you wouldn’t be able to tell exactly when H. sapiens merged into Heidelberg because each mother would look almost identical to the next — you can’t see the join. The changes from mother to mother are so gradual that you only see a change by comparing mothers thousands or millions of years apart. We only now know that Heidelberg is different from us because we’ve found his fossilised remains and we can compare it to ourselves today.This is why there’s no such thing as a transitional fossil or a missing link; every fossil is a transitional fossil and every living species is in transition to the next — if we had a fossil for every mother in the lines, even the experts wouldn’t be able to say where a separate species had been formed. We can only guess with hindsight.If you find this hard to grasp or you think it’s impossible for one species to change slowly into another we can see it happening today. For example, we call species that change slowly over geographic areas rather than time, ring species.Here in the UK the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull are distinct and non-interbreeding species. But if you physically follow the Herring Gull west towards North America it gradually blurs into something more like a Lesser Black-backed Gull. It carries on changing towards Siberia and when it finally returns to Western Europe the Herring Gull has become a Lesser Black-backed Gull and the two species don’t interbreed. At no point in the ring can you say exactly where it changed species — it’s a gradual merging of characteristics over distance.As you walk back further, at about 500,000 years ago, you’d see a branch form and go off sideways from our human line, these are the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). They lived along side us but developed separately. There may even be Neanderthal mothers in our line, because we think that for some time there was interbreeding.And so on down the line of mothers through increasingly apelike creatures until at about 2.5 million years ago we reach an animal called the Southern African ape (Australopithecus africanis). This creature is small — around 4 feet, with a brain a third the size of ours and although she stands upright like us, she’s covered in hair and is distinctly apelike. Some people think that this is roughly where chimps split from the human line but modern molecular genetics tells us that it was earlier.We have to walk much farther down the lines to get to where most evolution scientists think chimps branch off - somewhere about 7m years ago. This mother would have looked something like a chap called ‘Taumai’ (Sahelanthropus tchadensis). He has the same brain size as a modern chimp but his face is a little more like a human than a chimp.No one knows for sure whether Taumai is the point where chimps start off on their own line but we do know one thing for certain:Wherever the split actually happened, at this point in the two lines of human and chimp descendants you would see that the right hand of a mother from the chimp line is now holding the left hand of a mother from the human line.
The lines have met — the ancient chimp and the ancient human have the same mother.This mother starts the lines to both Pan and you, so Pan is your distant cousin. And both you, the human, and Pan, the ape are still here.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Makes sense, I'll a add a sentence or two on that......Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

That's a good one, I'll use it. Thanks.