Humans evolving from apes?

Question

I was having a discussion with my friend about this and he said humans evolved from apes during millions of years due to tiny genetic mutations.
Ok sure makes sense but, how come there are still apes if they evolved?
I thought about that and assumed there are still apes because not ALL of apes would have evolved.

But, then to use that argument surely there should be some humans who aren't as evolved or more evolved that the regular person. We're all the same, and as far as I know we've had the same human body for thousands of year, so how come some of us aren't more evolved than others? Why don't some of us have wings or some of us haven't developed the ability to speak yet?

Sure, some people ARE born with disabilities but they are just one offs, I'm talking families of people ALL with the same bodies, whether evolved more or less. They just don't exist

Can anybody try to explain this for me?

Answer 1

"surely there should be some humans who aren't as evolved or more evolved "



The variation in the human species is less then 1/10 of 1%. Call it a penny in ten dollars of pennies. All humans can interbreed. Finally the DNA sequences that comprise what we term as 'race" amount to only a few hundred sequences out of millions. Yes, we continue to evolve but at a practically unnoticeable pace. As example 10,000 years adults could not digest milk. (lactose intolerant) A mutation changed this and now most humans can eat dairy products.



"how come there are still apes if they evolved?"



This question appears once a week and there are over a thousand posts of it and it's versions. Humans began when a population became geographically isolated. Evolution was rapid in the small population and eventually resulted in a new species. There's nothing that said the main population 'had to' go extinct. Remember today's apes aren't what we came from. They have been evolving for millions of years too. That also explains "Why aren't apes becoming human?" as they are on their own path. Were humans wiped out there' s no reason and poor odds that they would ever re-evolve. As example the Toba super volcano some 70,000 years ago wiped out all but perhaps 1,000 breeding pairs of humans. It's very unlikely to have that event be repeated.



"Theres no known skeleton of a "unevolved""



The known human lineage is:



Ardipithicus ramidus 5 to 4 million years ago

Australopithecus anamensis 4.2 to 3.9 million years ago

Australopithecus afarensis 4 to 2.7 million years ago

Australopithecus africanus 3 to 2 million years ago

Australopithecus robustus 2.2 to 1.6 million years ago

Homo habilis 2.2 to 1.6 million years ago

Homo erectus 2.0 to 0.4 million years ago

Homo sapiens archaic 400 to 200 thousand years ago

Homo sapiens neandertalensis 200 to 30 thousand years ago

Homo sapiens sapiens 200 thousand years ago to present

http://www.onelife.com/evolve/manev.html



So there's plenty of bones of "unevolved" people. In fact I recall there's over 400 remains of Homo erectus that have been found.



Evolution is slow. Take your favorite music (a sympathy is best) and listen to one note a decade. That's much faster then evolution.

Answer 2

Evolution is more complicated than it seems. First of all, we did not come directly from apes. Like what the other user says, we share a common ancestor of the apes.



Second of all, humans don't evolve just because they get mutations. Mutations are bad. Evolution only occurs when a certain mutation gives a certain species an advantage over the others. And no, evolution does not happen over a few thousand years, but more like millions. That is why we do not see humans "evolve."



There's no such thing as one person being more "evolved" than others. But there is a thing where people are more fit than others. Fitness means reproductive success. People who can easily find mates and reproduce are considered fit.



There's something called speciation, meaning the same species splitting into two different species. So yes, it doesn't mean one species would necessarily grow extinct.



Third of all, the reason why the human population expanded is because we have advancing technology and more people can live longer lives. This is why some people believe that humans are in fact, going against evolution. People who are not fit, end up living and reproducing (such as in vitro fertilization). However, this is an entire new issue that deals with ethics.



And I've never heard of "devolving" before. I don't think there's such a thing. Nature selects the ones in a population that will survive. Let's say that humans had wings and can fly. They can go to places faster so they are more fit. But, one day, winds on earth got really strong and people can't really fly anymore. People who can't fly are now more fit. I know this is a bad example but this shows that species don't devolve. It just depends on the environment.



We can't say people are more "evolved" than others. There are differences in people because of their genetics and their environment. It's like saying fat people are more evolved because they can withstand the cold better than others or skinny people are more evolved because they are healthier.



Keep in mind that evolution really is just a theory. It is like everything else in science. The fact that your body is made is made up of cells is also a theory. 8 plants in the solar system? A theory? Dinosaurs exist? Also a theory. A theory is based on evidence.



Evolution can be disproven. But, you need to be like a biologist or something to do that. You do that by using science.



Science has nothing to do with faith. Evolution is not a religion. It is just science. Anything you learn in physics or chemistry classes could really just be false.



We can choose to believe in science or not.



I think it's best if you get a thorough study of evolution by taking college-level classes. I can't explain everything in detail because I don't remember.

Answer 3

Dogs evolved from wolves, and there are still wolves.



We did evolve from apes we just did not evolve from any existing ape species. Instead we and the other extant apes evolved from common ancestors that were themselves apes (and also mammals etc).



The evolution of a species is affected by its environment, members of the same species can become separated by geography and changes start to accumulate in these different populations over many generations, with enough time and enough separation the gene pools diverge enough and the populations change enough that they can no longer interbreed even if the stop being isolated. They have become separate species.



Quite a lot of evolution happens in this manner, a population becomes isolated and evolves into a new species. We have seen this process happen in the wild quite a few times in the last 150 years (when we have actually been looking for it).



And no, population growth figures in no way argue against the existence of humans for hundreds of thousands of years. No matter how fast a species reproduces its population remains limited by resources (mainly water and food), every living thing requires a certain amount of ood to survive and there is only a finite amount of food available at any time. Until about 15,000 years ago humans had no agriculture, they existed as hunter gatherers and that lifestyle can support only a tiny fraction of the population that modern agricultural technology can support.



We can see the evidence of this when we look a human populations in the last 2000 years. For many centuries, where agriculture did not advance, the population would grow to a certain level and then remain stable for hundreds of years until conditions changed. Rapid population growth such as we have seen in the last few centuries requires modern crops and agriculture and modern medicine and technology.



Just consider that the eradication of smallpox has probably saved the lives of over a hundred million people since 1979. Smallpox killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century alone.



Humans are evolving, we just have not changed physically that much. But we have not been around for that many generations because we mature and breed slowly compared to most other species.



This is why scientists often study evolution in bacteria, they breed so rapidly that you can track the population over the tens of thousands of generations needed to see them evolve.

Answer 4

No one who asks this question ever explains why they think all other apes would have vanished, just because humans evolved into humans.



You seem under the misaprehension that INDIVIDUALS evolve. That's now how evolution works.



Other apes DID evolve, they just evolved into species other than human. Chimps reached their current form AFTER humans reached ours, BTW. They are more recently evolved than we are.



???? No, there wouldn't be members of the human species who aren't human. That makes NO sense.



WINGS? Our body plan isn't amenable to wings, nor would wings do us any good. Evolution is constrained by what went before. If you wanted to understand evolution, there are innumerable resources that explain it clearly.



No, not everyone argues that we are constantly evolving. There's strong reason to conclude that most species stay pretty much the same for their time-spans.



Uh, yes there ARE many skeletons (actually, fossils) of pre-modern humans.



There are fossils of LOTS of species -- not only dinosaurs.

Answer 5

Humans didn't evolve from apes. Darwin postulates that humans and apes have a common ancestor.

Answer 6

According to evolution theory, modern humans and modern apes both evolved from a common ancestor...which was a primate. Darwin thought it was an ape. We simply took different evolutionary paths. Evolution theory does not require one type of creature to go extinct if a better one arises...one may fill a niche or migrate and survive in a different climate than another... or to evolve itself into a different form of life...it just happens that the ancestors of modern humans had the right genetic mixup and series of beneficial mutations which allowed them to evolve into what we are today whereas modern apes or primates took a different path without those genetic mixups. That's the theory anyway. I personally don't believe it's true but that's how it's presented.



If evolution were true and modern man has existed for roughly 2-500,000 years , according to mathematical population studies, the present population on earth would exceed the number of atoms in the unverse. Even an origin of 40,000 years ago would give us a present population of around 300 billion people. Neanderthals are asserted to have existed for roughly 90,000 years and we know they ritualistically buried ther dead in caves or graves. Where are all the graves? The population models show this could not be or the early people on earth had reproductive rates so low as to be stagnant for tens of thousands of years...something we've never witnessed in human history even with plagues and wars, famines, epidemics, genocides, etc... In the last 2000 years alone we've gone from roughly 500 million to over 6.5 billion people on earth. The math doesn't add up for human evolution and tens or hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on earth unless you assume reproductive rates which have never been observed.



http://ldolphin.org/popul.html



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY3c4NXPiZ4&feature=related



And the genetic evidence shows we're not evolving...we're devolving or degrading. Research shows that rapidly rising genetic defects in humans may lead to humanity becoming extinct within this century....and many other non-human lifeforms will also become extinct in large numbers due to rising genetic defects. Scientists are scrambling to document as many life forms as they can before they go extinct...for every new species found, it's estimated that 5-6 will have gone extinct before we can even observe them. Science tells us that 99 percent of all life forms that have ever lived on earth have gone extinct.



"By 2031, it is estimated (R2 = 0.995) there will be 100,000 human genetic disorders and by 2096 1,000,000 (see Figure 3). “At least one clinical disorder has been related to 1,318 of the mapped loci (roughly 30%)” (McKusick, 1998, Vol. 1, xiii - xviii). That suggests genetic disorder saturation of each locus by 2031 and supersaturation by 2096.



These data confirm human devolution and suggest imminent permanent genetic extinction in this century.





In 1997 from genetic testing, the estimate was that everyone on average carried six genetic disorders (Gargus, 1997). The extrapolation suggests that by 2033 the average for every man, woman and child may be 60 or more genetic disorders. The data indicate that the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet is in progress in non human life forms at a rate of 30,000 extinctions per year and accelerating (Leakey and Lewin, 1996, Chapter 13; Mass Extinction References, 1998).



The clear message is that mutations accelerate the permanent extinction of all life forms, including humans."

http://josephmastropaolo.com/data3.html



Edit: Scientists can also try to determine the minimum amount of people required to sustain a viable population over time...that ranges from 500 to 1000 mating pairs. So if Neanderthals did exist as primitive hunter- gatherers and a minimum of 500-1000 mating pairs were required and death rates did in fact equal birth rates for tens of thousands of years, we still should see 500 deaths per year X 90,000 years worth of graves or 45,000,000 graves at the very least. We have nowhere near that amount. The Inuit of the Eastern Arctic are also hunter-gatherers and they exhibit reproductive rates higher than normal.......

The birth rate among the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic is about four times higher than the national average per Canadian sources....so it's not entirely true that primitive people or hunter-gatherer societies must have had lower birth rates. That's an assumption.