Well, that would sort of include a huge number of Europeans and West Asians, since we're shown to be very distant hybrids of early homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis. LOL
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Why can't anyone explain this?
- Thread starter Theweirdtophat
- Start date
Well, that would sort of include a huge number of Europeans and West Asians, since we're shown to be very distant hybrids of early homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis. LOL
Speaking as someone who believes (a variant of) the former and accepts the latter...
I honestly don't know. One is purely based on personal experience and conviction at best, which is also highly unscientific at best, while the other is based on mountains of evidence that movies and TV shows seem to conveniently ... forget about.
I blame Brannon Braga.
Theweirdtophat
Well-Known Member
No I'm not trying to troll or anything, I'm just trying to get some answers as it raises some questions. Can anyone explain?
Augustus
…
Some species die out, others don't.
See the video I posted about it.
It is really very simple. The common ancestors became extinct, as is duly expected by the theory.
With all due respect, you seem to need a little more acquaintance with the basics of the Theory of Evolution.
Edited to add: oh, and of course, the chimpanzee (if that is what it is) at the left is not our distant ancestor, but rather our distant cousin. We had common ancestors that differentiated along different lines.
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Theweirdtophat
Well-Known Member
So all of the in between evolution died out except the apes and humans? Wouldn't you think the more intelligent in between species of humans/apes would survive more than the ape. Shouldn't there be at least out there.
Also if that picture doesn't accurately represent evolution, why does it keep getting used over and over? And doesn't it take millions of years to evolve. Human beings aren't even millions of years old.
Also If it was a fact, why is it still called the theory of evolution. For some reason people seem to think that if one doesn't accept evolution, they must accept creationism or that they hate science. No, maybe some people who do like science, like me, disagree with some theories. These are guesses. People can say they are educated guesses but a guess is still a guess.
Also not too many people give actual answers here. They just say "That's the way it is and that they died out,just because" and that I need to study the theory of evolution. That's not an answer and a rather lazy way of trying to back up your argument. If it was as valid as you claim, you wouldn't resort to telling me to look up the theory of evolution.
It's like in history class where people talk about Sumer but they never talk about how Sumer sprung up. Just that civilization all of a sudden appeared. So beings who barely knew how stone tools worked all of a sudden have a concept of math, science and politics. Something isn't being explained.
Because it's a meme, and that's how memes work.
No, a scientific theory is not a guess.
The word "theory" actually has two different meanings, depending on whether it's being used in common parlance, or in a scientific context.
In common parlance, yes, a theory is indeed a guess, albeit an assumed educated one.
However, in the sciences, a theory is an explanation of available data. When a single theory in a given field supersedes all others, it's a pretty safe bet that that theory is so well supported by all the data that it's likelihood of being incorrect is very close to 0, and so may as well be a fact. The only reason they're still called "theories" is because of that likelihood being close to 0, but never actually reaching 0. There's always that infinitesimally small chance that it's wrong given some new data showing up that contradicts it.
ImmortalFlame
Woke gremlin
How come all of your ancestors died and yet you and your immediate relatives are alive?
I really have no idea what you're asking here.
Because it's a useful illustration. It's simplified, but it that's all it really is - illustrative.
It took millions of years for HUMANS to evolve. SINCE then, humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years. There is no required "timeframe" for evolution to occur. Evolution is the process of change, so saying "evolution takes millions of years" is kind of like "walking takes ten minutes". The time required depends entirely on the starting point and the destination (as well as other factors, but we won't get into that here).
For the same reason that there is still a "theory of gravity" and "germ theory".
"Fact" is not a graduation of theory. In science, a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of facts. In other words: evolution itself IS a fact. The theory of evolution is the EXPLANATION for the fact. In the exact same way that gravity is a fact, and the THEORY of gravity explains the fact.
The problem is that you're making assumptions about the validity of evolution before having a basic understanding of it.
Because evolution is a complex, multi-faceted field of study, and you seem to lack a basic understanding of it. That's not an insult, just an observation. You may want to devote at least some time to trying to understand evolution properly before you can hope to understand the answers to the questions you are asking. It's akin to someone asking "How does a^2 + b^2 = 3^2?" before they actually understand basic arithmetic. You need to at least understand the basics before we can get into the complexities that provide answers to your questions. I'm certain that there are plenty of people on here (as well as an extremely useful FAQ here: http://www.religiousforums.com/thre...-tutorials-on-the-theory-of-evolution.100967/) that will be happy to try and give you a grounding in the basics of the subject.
I've seen multiple posts providing lots of explanations and references, sources and videos all explaining it to you. Why are you not addressing them?
I actually think its usefulness is questionable, at best, since it reinforces common misunderstandings of how evolution works, such as what the OP is demonstrating.
Skwim
Veteran Member
If you have a few minutes take a look at this.
An introduction to evolution a very basic, easy-to-understand presentation of evolution
The definition
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.
The explanation
Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.
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The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, just as you and your cousins share a common grandmother.
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Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.
TO Page 1 and MORE
The definition
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.
The explanation
Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.
TO Page 1 and MORE
ImmortalFlame
Woke gremlin
Except we DON'T have millions of the former. It's not a contemporary ape. The genus it is depicting is Dryopithecus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryopithecus). They most likely went extinct over 13 million years ago (SOURCE: http://eol.org/pages/4454159/overview)
Midnight Rain
Well-Known Member
Our common ancestor was far more chimpanzee like than we were. But the chimpanzee is not the same species as our common ancestor. It is a sister species that evolved alongside us albeit far further south.
The chimpanzee's are not our grandparents but our cousins.
There are several now extinct species more closely related to humans. The most recent to die out were the neanderthal. But in reality you are asking the wrong question. Why do we need a now living relative to link us to chimpanzee's when chimpanzee's ARE the now living relatives that show our common ancestor to other apes such as Gorilla and Orangutan species.
I think there are a few misconceptions about the nature of what evolution actually is/really entails. First thing to remember is that we're talking about time scales which we're unable to comprehend. I mean that literally. We're able to measure, from day to day what we do in a week and 'feel' that time. We're able to consider say... 10 years. We can look back at our lives and have an understanding of the things that happened. When we talk about millions of years, we're just saying words. The actual time we're talking about makes no real sense to us.
Our evolution as a primate species has already been explained here... we're not on the same branch of the tree as other primate species we see today.
What made those apes evolve in the first place? You're asking scientists to delve into the genetic mutation process of a species which no longer exists and which occurred over a long period of time. There's speculation about the state of human chromosome #2 and it's make up, suggesting that it fused from two existing chromosomes. That would explain the difference in chromosomes between humans and other ape species. It's a logical conclusion to come to though.
I fully agree with your comments on the big bang. I don't like it. I don't like the name and I don't like how it infers the same as what other atheists complain about in creationism. What happened before it? How did it happen? Research on a theory called the big bounce theory (still hate the name) addresses some of these issues but there are still unanswered questions.
That brings me to the broader issue. We can only make sense of all of this with what we have. We have overwhelming, hard, measurable evidence to support biological evolution. Overwhelming, physical, substantiated evidence is all we can use to explain how things have occurred. If there's no hard evidence (as in the big bang theory) then we work from the surrounding evidence... the reasons why there are certain metals in this planet, it's rotation and axis, it's proximity to the moon, the observations that ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre Array) has made of the light emitting from the beginning of the existence of light... these are the things we have to use. And the results we get from these first hand observations are wildly different to the ideas which we thought up when we literally didn't know any better.
Our evolution as a primate species has already been explained here... we're not on the same branch of the tree as other primate species we see today.
What made those apes evolve in the first place? You're asking scientists to delve into the genetic mutation process of a species which no longer exists and which occurred over a long period of time. There's speculation about the state of human chromosome #2 and it's make up, suggesting that it fused from two existing chromosomes. That would explain the difference in chromosomes between humans and other ape species. It's a logical conclusion to come to though.
I fully agree with your comments on the big bang. I don't like it. I don't like the name and I don't like how it infers the same as what other atheists complain about in creationism. What happened before it? How did it happen? Research on a theory called the big bounce theory (still hate the name) addresses some of these issues but there are still unanswered questions.
That brings me to the broader issue. We can only make sense of all of this with what we have. We have overwhelming, hard, measurable evidence to support biological evolution. Overwhelming, physical, substantiated evidence is all we can use to explain how things have occurred. If there's no hard evidence (as in the big bang theory) then we work from the surrounding evidence... the reasons why there are certain metals in this planet, it's rotation and axis, it's proximity to the moon, the observations that ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre Array) has made of the light emitting from the beginning of the existence of light... these are the things we have to use. And the results we get from these first hand observations are wildly different to the ideas which we thought up when we literally didn't know any better.
Skwim
Veteran Member
Great Illustration! Just to forestall the obvious question, this should be included in all creationist literature. Of course it won't stop the trolls from trolling, but it may help the honestly ignorant.THIS is what hominid (great ape) evolution, with particular emphasis on upright-walking apes, actually looks like:
This has already been explained to you several times both in this thread and the last one. How many more times are you just going to repeat your initial question without actually bothering to respond to the answers you're given?
Why do you believe in these invisible entities? Is there any direct evidence for them?
You say you believe in natural selection, but then you're dubious about its natural and expected effects.
Why would monkeys disappear if they were still successfully exploiting an ecological niche? Just because some individuals were born with features that enabled them to expand their resource exploitation, if the original design still works, why would it disappear? Why would reptiles change if they were well adapted to their niches?
When an ecological niche persists for a long period, there is no pressure for those organisms successfully exploiting it to change. Sharks, ferns and crocodiles are good designs and have persisted essentially unchanged for a very long time. But when environments change, or a new niche opens up, you get rapid evolution and new species.
You don't understand how natural selection works, weirdophat. It's not a progression,
The Big Bang Theory is a work in progress. It is not an alternative to Goddidit inasmuch as it's a theory of mechanism, not agency. Goddidit is just an assertion of agency with no explanation of mechanism -- apples and pineapples.
And the ToE has nothing to do either Big bang or Goddidit.
Why does there have to be a "who?"