Saturday, November 04, 2023

Humans Evolved from Apes

Evolutionary biology professor Jerry Coyne has written excellent book on the evidence, and gives good arguments, such as in this blog post. Er, I mean, web site post. But some of it is confusing.

Evolutionists like to say that it is an error to say that humans evolved from apes. That is because humans are apes, and it is a mistake to think that humans are more evolved than apes. All species are equally evolved to adapt to their niches. The more accurate statement is that today's humans, chimps, and other apes descent from common ancestors.

Coyne says the same thing, but look how he explains the above picture:

Note that the skull at upper left is the skull of a modern chimp, so it doesn’t really belong with the others. It’s just there for comparison. But look how things change over time: the face gets pulled back, the teeth get smaller, the brow ridges shrink, and most evident, the braincase gets larger.

Creationists have big trouble with this because they don’t know where to draw the line between “apes” and “humans”. ...

I like the photo simply because it’s a wonderful piece of evidence for human evolution, with the skulls laid out in temporal order. ...

Working on that note, this composition implies that our ancestral form was a chimp and once the chimp and human lines diverged then humans went through many natural selection events while chimps just remained stagnant as chimps. That’s wrong. Chimps and humans share a common ape ancestor.
But if you point out that the modern chimp skull is simply there for comparison, and that in all likelihood is fairly similar to the skull of our common ancestor with modern chimps, the problem disappears.

No, the problem does not disappear. He assumes that a modern chimp skull looks about the same as one 6-10 million years ago. So much so that you can put the modern chimp skull in the progression of human skull evolution, and it fits right in.

Apparently the evolutionists do not want to say that humans evolved from apes, because that would imply that we are superior to apes, and that would be bigoted.

No, it is not bigoted. We are not apes. Something made us different. It is obvious.

Evolutionists hate it when someone asks, "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" Look at the picture. Humans gradually progressed to big-brained thinkers, while chimps stagnated for 10 million years.

It is increasingly obvious that humans got separated from chimps and were somehow in an environment of rapid evolutionary change. Maybe it was over 200,000 years, maybe in the last million years, maybe even in Europe. No one knows. At any rate, it is completely legitimate to ask why chimps did not evolve like humans.

1 comment:

CFT said...

Evolution as it is presently understood isn't very scientific, like many other theories, it's a kludge of many ideas, many of those ideas not actually agreeing with one another.

For one thing, it is painfully obvious for anyone who has studied evolution, that it is purely an act of blind faith to say evolution (as presently taught) could originate life. It can't. With my respects to Carl Sagan, NO, you don't just apply a bolt of electricity to primordial goo and amino acids and voila! Evolution can account for some changes to existing organisms, but not their origin ex nihilo, and the time required for said mutations from amino acids to complex life would easily require far more time (measured in billions of years) than the planet we live on has existed to the best of our scientific knowledge.

If you are going to claim evolution is responsible for all the life on this planet, you are going to have to change quite a few other fields of scientific study, like cosmology, geology, biology, chemistry, genetics by orders of magnitude, and on the probability side of things, quite a bit of mathematics and statistitcal understanding.

Evolution as postulated can also not even remotely begin to explain what exactly happened during the Cambrian explosion. It simply can't. Mathematicians ARE all over this one. You don't go from simple single cell organisms to complex vertebrates in a few hundred million years, there are formula which supposedly inform the rate of random mutation which can't even begin to explain the wide divergence, complexity, and sheer abundance of varied life in such a tiny amount of geological time by natural random processes of trial and error, which is what presently determines benign, fatal, or useful mutations...most of which are statistically in the 'fatal' category statisically.

There also is NO continuous life on this planet, as much as we can tell scientifically. It has been wiped out several times by extinction level events, some of which made the world lifeless except for bacteria possibly surviving hundreds of meters below the surface...several times. You simply don't come back from simple bacteria in a hundred million years by any evolutionary mechanism understood presently.

Life is messy. Truth, sometimes even more so. Whatever the causes and mechanics of how life evolved so quickly on our planet, SEVERAL TIMES, ...evolution as taught is not adequate to explain it, other than as a intellectual 'Hail Mary' to fend of supernatural or religious explanations. I understand that many have aversions to 'intelligent' design of any kind (much less free will) of anything, fine, I get it, I really do, but that isn't a license to bullshit under the guise of science because you are uncomfortable with the FACT that life on this planet randomly occurring, is incredibly improbable, to the mathematical point of absurdity.

The many worlds theory is largely an outgrowth result of this statistical truth, the sheer improbability of the existence of intelligent life. By invoking many worlds, you increase your sample size of possible spontaneous petri-dish formations of life by infinity, thus making it more probable than zero since you have pretty much an infinite number of chances for some random mutation... but this is once again hiding the truth of our improbable existence under ever more layers of pseudoscience bullshit designed to hide the level of uncertainty.