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This is my personal observation that keeps me skeptical of evolution.
Evolution is science. Having an opinion about it is kind of sad. Do you have an opinion about whether or not electricity works to power your computer? Regardless of what your opinion is, do you think your computer would work by electricity anyways?
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Why did the creatures created by the stages of evolution between one species and the next die out.
There are no known animals that are immortal. They died, probably by the same process that any other animals die.
You probably mean to ask why our ancestor genes did not survive in a representative lineage to this day. Its mostly just "survival of the fittest" that's going on.
Ardipithecus ramidus was probably defeated by the contemporary chimpanzee ancestor soon after they spawned australopithecus because they lived in the same place and ate similar food (and the chimpanzee is alive today while a forest dwelling ardipithecus offspring is not).
From Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo ergaster to Homo heidelbergensis to Archaic Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiens, each one was simply better at surviving or obtaining food than its immediate predecessor and they all lived in the same place (Africa) while there was not a surplus of food.
Homo neanderthalis was a sister species that we have pretty good evidence that we coexisted with (by immigrating to their lands in europe about 40-50K years ago), then directly out-competed for resources (including the possibility of direct, but likely limited, warfare.)
For side-species like Homo georgicus, Homo pekeninsis and Homo floresiensis they appear to have died out for no obvious reason. However, these guys spread out to all sorts of weird places (Georgia, China and Indonesia) where climate changes had far more drammatic effects on the animal fauna.
Things like Kenyanthropus, Homo rudolphensis, and so on, they probably could have been done in by climate or (like the Neanderthals) direct competition with their contemporaries along our lineage.
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Simple and extremely complex organisms coexist together. So why couldn't a less developed human survive?
Homo floresiensis came pretty close. They might have lived as recently as 13K years ago. But as I explain above, one of the main reasons (for the non-floresiensis) is that we Homo sapiens were a little too good at getting access to the limited food just before our less adapted competitor ancestors were.
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It must have survived long enough to evolve into us.
If I evolved the ability to breath under water that would not lead to all other humans dying out.
Correct. Similarly, I don't think Australopithecines were involved in the extinction of Ardipithecus, nor do I think Homo heidelbergensis was the end of Homo pekinensis. In those cases other environmental factors, or in fact other species entirely could have caused their extinction.
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To me species look complete and not on the verge of any kind of speciation. Plus it must have taken millions of very gradual mutations to create us.
That doesn't make any sense. There are never any overt signs of a species "speciating" except when put in direct comparison to what came before and after it (at which point *every* species looks like its about ready to speciate.) How do you explain Homo georgicus, for example? It looks like a Homo habilis from the waist up - spinal column, and a Homo ergaster from the waist down + spinal column. But at the same time, it also just looks like yet another complete ancient ancestor for us that could just stand (no pun intended to the anthropologically literate) on its own.
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So we can't have gone from monkey to human overnight which makes it essential that intermediates hang around for a long time.
Humans are a kind of ape. By the old taxa we are not a kind of monkey and didn't come from one. From a more cladistic point of view of course, we are all monkeys. Either way your statement makes no sense.
Humans and chimps spawned from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago, that was likely contemporary to something like Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Both proceeded in very gradual steps to evolve into their current modern forms -- and that *IS* what the fossil record is showing us. Under usual evolutionary conditions we would continue to evolve, and thus are ourselves merely a transitional form to what our offspring eventually would become.
But its possible that we have put an end to really serious evolution of our own species because of our memetic-based survival mechanisms (we make and control our own food supply, and we also control the affects of the environment upon us). Though simple things like women evolving to have menopause later in life seems like a likely adaptation if the western world continues its kind of modern life-style (at the very least it would be highly selected for).
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