OK and another thing is if you go back to my FIRST post, my question was "do yo believe we originated from monkeys/apes/chimpanzees.
Most answers were Apes: YES
So do you all not agree on this? To me it seems some of you are contradicting each other.
I think there are several reasons for that, and they kind of came up near the beginning of the thread, IIRC.
One is that "monkey" is not a scientific term, and not all of us use the same definition. My preferred definition, for example, is that everything that is descended from the last common ancestor of all living monkeys is a monkey. (What would you expect, I study evolutionary biology
) For others, a monkey is defined by its characteristics, some of which apes don't have, or by their belonging to certain groups, as
Wikipedia puts it: "any cercopithecoid (
Old World monkey) or platyrrhine (
New World monkey) primate."
The other issue is a different ambiguity. When you just say "monkey", it could be interpreted to mean "extant monkeys" (especially because we've seen that kind of misconception plenty of times before), in which case, the answer is a clear NO, but it could also be interpreted to mean "monkeys in general", in which case the answer may be YES (depending on issue one).
In summary, we contradict each other over semantics, but we agree over the essence of the answer. We, I think, all accept this
basic family tree of monkeys and apes, where branches are lines of descent, and humans are somewhere inside "great apes"
(the coloured dots are common ancestors I marked for the purposes of an earlier thread).
Of course, by itself, atavism doesn't prove evolution.
But start combining it with other evidence. Research almost anything in my sig, in particular human chromasome
Chrom
osome
, Homo Neanderthalis DNA,
It's
neanderthalensis, and you don't capitalise specific names
Sorry, I'm having a language nazi night
I think spelling things right and generally knowing what you're talking about helps your image a lot.
(Also:
Australopithecus, and
Homo floresiensis.)
No, "evolutionist doctrine" would say that mtEve cam first, followed by mtAdam thousands of years later.
Y-chromosomal Adam, you mean?
-----
GuidanceNeeded, I'd love you to come back for some civil discussion, if only because I'm itching to educate
If nothing else, your performance in debate should benefit from knowing thy enemy a bit better.
(And quite apart from being one of the best supported theories in the history of science, evolution is a huge field and really, really
interesting. But I'm biased.
)
