Why are there still apes?

coffee4u said:

Believe in those extinct apes and diseased deformed humans as some in-between kind all you want, won't make it true.

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What is homo erectus? Is it a diseased human or an extinct ape? How do you know?

coffee4u said:

It doesn't matter what people classify humans as, God classified everything first and his word stands. Apes and humans are NOT the same family.
1 Corinthians 15:39
Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.

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Uh, birds and fish (and people) are animals.

What kind of flesh did homo erectus have? Did it have people flesh or animal flesh?

Tone said:

Yes, for the same reason that lemon trees produce lemons...that produce...lemon trees!

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...that are slightly different from the parent lemon trees which were slightly different from the grandparent lemon trees. Somehow you forgot to mention that.

Greengardener said:

This was an entertaining read, but since none of us really knows nor can we prove anything about it, it was just a reading of fiction and opinions, proving one thing for sure: we all have brain power in the form of imagination and information processing, and it proves we can type.

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It is more than fiction. Every step of the way is documented by evidence. Yes, in some places the evidence is weak and subject to other interpretations, but what do you expect when trying to work with a trail of evidence that was left to us over millions of years? In spite of the difficulty in getting the evidence, there is an amazing body of work documenting human evolution.

The point is that natural evolutionary causes can be seen to make one ape species to become the ancestor of two lines, the humans and chimpanzees. The opening post shows some of the ways that natural forces drove humanity in one direction, and chimpanzees in the other.

Tone said:

So...by mentioning this, do you foresee somewhere down the line these lemons becoming something else?

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I see lemon trees of the future becoming significantly different from current lemon trees, yes.

Millions of years from now, lemon trees might still be called "lemon trees" (if there is anybody that still speaks English), but the descendent trees might be as different from our current lemon trees as humans are from our primate ancestors.

Jok said:

A better question is why have ape brains not evolved to protect themselves from the destruction that the human brained species causes on the world, which is a direct threat to apes? Evolution can’t see the forest, it can only see the trees?

They won’t survive if humans destroy the world.

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I don't know if questions of human evolution or questions of environmental protection are better. But since this thread is about human evolution, you might want to start another thread if questions about environmental protection are more important to you.

Yes, these creatures became enlightened.

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Uh, no, the first apes to come out of the jungle were not John Locke or Thomas Hobbes. They were apes very similar to the apes in the jungle. They were finding food on the edges of the jungle. In this environment, evolution found that cognitive abilities were more important for them than keen senses. In these creatures, the proportion of the brain dedicated to cognitive functions increased.

Frivolous? We obsessively search the stars for signs of another enlightened species that is somewhere out there with this cognition. It is hardly treated as a frivolous attribute. This frivolous attribute has given humans a monopoly on the planet in a way that is a direct threat to apes, the doomsday clock is very much a factor for apes.

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Understood, I was not trying to say that cognitive abilities are frivolous. Rather, I was saying that, for most apes, expansion of cognitive abilities can be frivolous if it comes at the expense of decreased brainpower dedicated to the senses.

They were not smart enough to use tools because evolution didn’t allow their brains to grow. It was written in the cards that we would start using tools and dominate/harm the world after evolution allowed our brains to grow to a point of enlightenment.

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Nothing was written in the cards. Had Lucy and her kind inherited a sandy island with no rocks or predators, but plenty of bananas, evolution would have turned out much different. But our ancestors had hands that could use tools, had increased cognitive ability, had available stones to make tools, and had huge survival benefits from tools. The result is that our ancestors became good at using simple tools.

Again lots of species that were separated from trees throughout Earth’s history certainly didn’t result in self enlightenment world destruction capabilities.

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Understood. Hippos never kept up with us in brainpower.

Of all the creatures living in the African rift valley, only hominids developed high levels of cognitive brain power. There were a number of factors that all worked together to cause this, such as flexible hands that could use tools, available tools, food sources that required tools, and the ability for our ancestors' brain size to increase significantly after birth during a prolonged infancy. These were not all present in the hippo.

You’re just giving example after example of what large brained animals can do that smaller brained animals can’t do. Who is arguing against this?

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Had our larger-brained ancestors inherited an island full of fruit trees and nuts, with no predators or prey, our evolutionary history would have been much different. We might have never learned to cook. The future of humanity was not cast in stone once our ancestors got larger brains.

Lol huh? You’re saying that we grew our own brains now, because we like protein? What a reach!

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Uh, no, I am saying that big brains uses a lot of energy. So growing a bigger brain can be a detriment to animals if the bigger brain does not give the animal more food energy than what the animal would have gotten without the enlarged brain.

And bigger brains are a major issues for primates who never had developed the trick of continuing brain development after birth through a long infancy. For other primates to catch up with us, they would have needed to go through that process like our earlier ancestors did, or have evolution give them some other means of giving them larger brains in spite of the restrictions of the birth canal.

Well it’s weird that evolution is so blind to the big picture, since humans are a threat to apes it’s interesting that an evolutionary brain growth hasn’t taken place for them as well.

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Evolution is blind. It has produced humans that find it far easier to fret about their local restaurant changing ownership then about the planet becoming uninhabitable for their descendents.

But it has not prevented us from behaving wisely.

Perhaps you and I, and all others who are concerned about the environment, can prevail in keeping our planet a great place for humans to live.

Tone said:

What about the real language that makes them lemons?

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What language is the real language?

Lost4words said:

We didnt evolve from apes.

We are made in God's image....

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Oh my word! You mean the entire scientific establishment is mistaken?

Please, please, share the evidence that led you to this conclusion.