Why do people call it the "Theory of Evolution"?

[DJ_Ghost]

Look at your hands Aron.

You don't have monkey hands! Every other species of the monkey kind has monkey hands.

Can't you see?

Define Monkey hands.

Ghost

 

[Sanguine]

Back to the bridge, before the delicious kids safely cross!

 

[Aron-Ra]

Look at your hands Aron.

You don't have monkey hands! Every other species of the monkey kind has monkey hands.

Can't you see?

I see that I have grasping hands with opposable thumbs, fingerprinted tactile pads, and flat keratinous fingernails, the same as every other ape, which makes these Old World monkey hands. Why don't you see?

 

[MarkT]

I see that I have grasping hands with opposable thumbs, fingerprinted tactile pads, and flat keratinous fingernails, the same as every other ape, which makes these Old World monkey hands. Why don't you see?

Yeah but they're not monkey-like hands; made for climbing trees and swinging from branches. Monkey hands are made for climbing trees and swinging from branches and walking on. You have a higher degree of thumb opposability. You don't have the arms to swing from branches that go with the hands. You don't walk on all fours. Your legs are longer than your arms. You don't have the prehensile feet that go with the hands. You don't have the legs to go with the feet.

Your overall appearance is human-like and not monkey-like.

 

[Aron-Ra]

I see that I have grasping hands with opposable thumbs, fingerprinted tactile pads, and flat keratinous fingernails, the same as every other ape, which makes these Old World monkey hands. Why don't you see?

Yeah but they're not monkey-like hands; made for climbing trees and swinging from branches. Monkey hands are made for climbing trees and swinging from branches and walking on.

Catarrhines, the Old World monkeys, tended to not to be arboreal. Most of them lived on the ground like we do, and didn't swing in the trees.

You have a higher degree of thumb opposability.

Yes, I have greater thumb opposability than most other primates. But that doesn't mean I am not a primate myself. The new Caddillac V-16 has more horsepower than any other car on Earth. But that doesn't mean that it isn't a car. Understand?

You don't have the arms to swing from branches that go with the hands.

Yes I do. I have the brachiation and the occipital arc of the shoulder that goes with that. Or should I say came from that?

You don't walk on all fours. Your legs are longer than your arms. You don't have the prehensile feet that go with the hands. You don't have the legs to go with the feet.

And neither did Oreopithecus, Ardipithecus, or any of either the Australopithecines or Paranthropines. All of them were bi-pedal, most of them didn't have such long arms, and some of them didn't have prehensile feet either. Yet they were all hominids (great apes) just like we are.

Your overall appearance is human-like and not monkey-like.

That's like saying that a Caddillac looks like a Caddillac, and not like a car.

 

[MarkT]

Aron

Yes, I have greater thumb opposability than most other primates. But that doesn't mean I am not a primate myself. The new Caddillac V-16 has more horsepower than any other car on Earth. But that doesn't mean that it isn't a car. Understand?

We don't have monkey kind characters like the monkeys you just mentioned. The Old World Monkeys are clearly monkeys and every other monkey species is clearly a kind of monkey.

It's not as if we have some. We don't have any.

Look at the Primates. They all look like they belong to the monkey kind. They all have the monkey kind characters which you would expect to see if they belonged to the monkey kind.

They all look like animals. They all look like they come from the same gene pool. They all live in the jungle. Most of them climb trees. They walk on all fours.

We don't have feet for climbing trees. We don't have hands for walking on. We don't walk on all fours. We're not knuckle-walkers. We're not made for tree climbing

You can easily see there's a monkey kind and a human kind.

Even the scientific system puts us into the Hominidae family as distinguished from the Pongidae family, or anthropoid apes.

Yet we don't have any monkey kind characters to relate us to the Primates.

 

[Riddick]

some people want to be descendants of apes, and that's fine. i'm glad we have gorilla's and the whole lot with us. god could have made us a world without primates, but they then would just point to whales, who also have digits in their flippers. if it wasn't apes, it'd be whales. if no whales existed, it'd be something else, like a cat. they've got nails/claws!!! they're just like us!!! i'd rather have these creatures here with us, despite the want to be their descendants.

 

[Socrastein]

Riddick, don't make the hideously foolish mistake of confusing "wanting to be descendants of apes" with "accepting that all the evidence proves we are descendants of apes".

 

[Dal M.]

Aron
You can easily see there's a monkey kind and a human kind.

You'd think, then, that creationists would have a better track record at figuring out which is which...

 

[Riddick]

Riddick, don't make the hideously foolish mistake of confusing "wanting to be descendants of apes" with "accepting that all the evidence proves we are descendants of apes".

where the mistake is made, then its foolish.

 

[Manic Depressive Mouse]

Even the scientific system puts us into the Hominidae family as distinguished from the Pongidae family, or anthropoid apes.

Yet we don't have any monkey kind characters to relate us to the Primates.

So a tail isn't monkey like?

 

[raphael_aa]

I don't know. It's easy to be confused. But sometimes you know someone just by looking in their eyes.

 

[MarkT]

No. This is like jumping to a new class without any new characters.

Humans have no monkey kind characters. And the features that distinguish them are significant as Aves is different from Reptiles.

Humans are so different anatomically and yet they look like the ape ancestor presumably. That's not speciation.

 

[h2whoa]

MarkT, you can continue to spout on and stonewall about Humans having mo "monkey kind" characteristics, by which you probably mean "ape" I assume. However you're quite wrong.

Stop me when I get to a distinguishing charateristic of primates that makes "them" so different to "us".

(taken from: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/Primates/Facts/Primateness/default.cfm)

Forward-facing eyes for binocular vision (allowing depth perception)
Increased reliance on vision: reduced noses, snouts (smaller, flattened), loss of vibrissae (whiskers), and relatively small, hairless ears
Colour vision
Opposable thumbs for power grip (holding on) and precision grip (picking up small objects)
Grasping fingers aid in power grip
Flattened nails for fingertip protection, development of very sensitive tactile pads on digits
Primitive limb structure, one upper limb bone, two lower limb bones, many mammalian orders have lost various bones, especially fusing of the two lower limb bones
Generalist teeth for an opportunistic, omnivorous diet; loss of some primitive mammalian dentition, humans have lost two premolars
Progressive expansion and elaboration of the brain, especially of the cerebral cortex
Greater facial mobility and vocal repertoire
Progressive and increasingly efficient development of gestational processes
Prolongation of postnatal life periods
Reduced litter size—usually just one (allowing mobility with clinging young and more individual attention to young)
Most primates have one pair of mammae in the chest
Complicated social organization

How, exactly, do we not fit in here?

h2

 

[Loudmouth]

Humans have no monkey kind characters. And the features that distinguish them are significant as Aves is different from Reptiles.

So what are those differences, specifically.

 

[Ampoliros]

you have a name for everthing dont you. do you all get a manual to use agaisnt creationist.

Yeah, the EAC hands one out on a regular basis.

 

[Stairway]

some people want to be descendants of apes, and that's fine. i'm glad we have gorilla's and the whole lot with us. god could have made us a world without primates, but they then would just point to whales, who also have digits in their flippers. if it wasn't apes, it'd be whales. if no whales existed, it'd be something else, like a cat. they've got nails/claws!!! they're just like us!!! i'd rather have these creatures here with us, despite the want to be their descendants.

Desire has no place in evolution. You are incorrect though, as we did not decend from apes, but rather a common ancestor. Nonetheless, whether you want to have decended from the common ancestor or not, makes no difference in the actuality of the situation. Although, if you refute evolution, I can only assume that you refute that smoking is harmful, as it is only a theory. And, I am assuming that you refute the existance of sub-atomic particles because their existance is only theoretical. I get discouraged when people refute evolution, when they do not understand what it is they are refuting.

 

[MarkT]

Some of the features would include a brain with greater functional ability and of a larger size, a flatter face, reduced brow ridges, a less protruding jaw, evenly sized teeth, long hair on the head but sparse and short on the body, legs that are 30% longer than arms and straight, feet made for walking, the skeleton and soft parts of different proportions and configurations, a body with subcutaneous fat, a bow shaped tooth row, small canines, bicuspid premolars.

Chimpanzees may adopt the occasional two-legged pose, but they differ dramatically from humans in anatomy and behavior.

E. PERORELLI/YERKES RIGIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER

 

[Loudmouth]

Some of the features would include a brain with greater functional ability and of a larger size, a flatter face, reduced brow ridges, a less protruding jaw, evenly sized teeth, long hair on the head but sparse and short on the body, legs that are 30% longer than arms and straight, feet made for walking, the skeleton and soft parts of different proportions and configurations, a body with subcutaneous fat, a bow shaped tooth row, small canines, bicuspid premolars.

Chimpanzees may adopt the occasional two-legged pose, but they differ dramatically from humans in anatomy and behavior.

E. PERORELLI/YERKES RIGIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER

But that's all microevolution, changes in what was already there.

 

[Ledifni]

It cannot be a theory...
In order for it to be classified as a theory, scientists must be able to reproduce their findings.

Um, not exactly. Scientists must be able to make successful predictions, which is not quite the same thing. Evolution predicts, for example, that there will be a high degree of correlation between a nested heirarchy based on morphology and one based on genetic variation, and indeed we find this to be true in nature.

So technically, evolution is just a hypothesis; is it not?

No, it has passed the same criteria that every other theory has.

EDIT: Woah. I jumped in here a little late, didn't I?