Ask me about Evolution

[Breathe]

Okay, so here's something which made me chuckle.

Someone said "If we evolved from monkeys, why are they still around, and why don't we have tails?"
So I explain how we didn't evolve from monkeys but from a common ape-ancestor and not any specific, and so on and so forth.

"Oh, okay. But if we did evolve from monkeys instead... would we have tails?"
"Um, probably?"
"What would we look like?"

Is there anything I could've said besides "...smaller, stupider... tail-ier?" (which was my answer, along with shrugged shoulders and upturned palms) as an answer?

And then, "Is there any way of knowing what something will evolve into?"
"What?"
"You know, how another animal is going to look when it's evolved."
"... that's... not how evolution works... and I'm pretty sure this isn't Pokémon... (try to explain how natural selection works and it'd really depend on mutations and so on)"


So... can you think of any "better" answers than mine to these two questions:

1) "How would we look if we evolved from monkeys instead?"
2) "How can we know how something what something will look like when 'it's evolved'?" (whatever THAT means... I don't really know...)


(And ftr, this was from an atheist, which made it all the more cringe-worthy.)

 

[philbo]

1) "How would we look if we evolved from monkeys instead?"
2) "How can we know how something what something will look like when 'it's evolved'?"

1) Probably not much different: there are plenty of cases of convergent evolution, where in order to fill the same ecological niche, animals with very different evolutionary histories have come to look the same - here I'd have posted a link to the wiki page on convergent evolution, but it won't let me until I've posted lots. But googling "convergent evolution" will show plenty of examples.

2) More suited to whatever environment an organism happens to be living in - it's not necessarily predictable as one can't know what variability is already in the gene pool, or what mutations might occur; only that mutations that help survival/reproduction will outperform those that don't.


PS Hello everyone

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

1) Probably not much different: there are plenty of cases of convergent evolution, where in order to fill the same ecological niche, animals with very different evolutionary histories have come to look the same - here I'd have posted a link to the wiki page on convergent evolution, but it won't let me until I've posted lots. But googling "convergent evolution" will show plenty of examples.

2) More suited to whatever environment an organism happens to be living in - it's not necessarily predictable as one can't know what variability is already in the gene pool, or what mutations might occur; only that mutations that help survival/reproduction will outperform those that don't.


PS Hello everyone

I guess for the second one you could also get into artificial selection?

 

[philbo]

I guess for the second one you could also get into artificial selection?

Indeed - and if it's mankind determining which characteristics are selected for, you can have a far better idea of what the end point* of that bit of evolution is going to be


*..when I say "end point", it's more like a stop along the journey