Some Schmo: "One of my favorites is that 'we came from apes.' Talk about a fundamental misunderstanding."
EAllusion: "I think it is fair to say we came from apes."
Who needs creationists when, given half the chance, evolution fans will disagree amongst themselves.
Schmo's original claim was that this belief was not only ignorance, but
willful ignorance. I am asking questions here, and I have been met with antagonistic sarcasm.
Why don't all fish look like sharks if they shared a common ancestor?
I don't know that they do all share the same ancestor. This is the premise that is taken for granted. I mean according to your paradigm, all life on earth, humans included, evolved from sea life, right? But my question wasn't about appearance.
Natural selection acts on different populations in different ways. It does so without an end result in mind.
I do not see how natural selection explains why humans evolved into humans from an ape-like species while others did not.
As I understand it, natural selection is when favorable herditary traits become more dominant and unfavorable ones are gradually dropped. It seems unlikely that this process could happen without some kind of goal in mind, specifically survival. Adaptaion explains why some species can camoflauge themselves naturally.
How does it explain why species X forked at some point in time and one group dropped 90% of its body hair, became physically weaker yet intellectually stronger, whereas the rest became some other variant of primate? What plausible scenario explains how this sort of adaptation took place? I know it is simply taken for granted that it must have happened, but nobody has actually explained it, other than to say that is how it must have happened since the alternative (Genesis) is just a myth.
Natural selection alone can't explain how one cell evolved into billions of different species. It doesn't even begin to explain it because natural selection takes place once a group of different species already exist. With only one living cell in existence, there is nothing for it to"select" or "adapt" to.
I can't answer your non sequitur.
Dude,
It is the question I raised. At the alleged point in time when species X began to "evolve" into humans, what prevented the rest of X from doing likewise? How does natural selection account for the human dropping most of its hair, gradually standing upright, losing more than half of its body strength, and becoming by far the most intelligent species on the planet? I sincerely want to know.
Answering this would better help me understand the logic behind evolution.
Are you serious?
Because if you are, I can explain it to you in three steps.
I'm dead serious. And I am confused. First of all, Schmo said it is an ignorant misunderstanding to say humans evolved from apes, and then EAllusion, one of the more informed pro-evolution posters around, said that this is a fair and accurate statement to make. And now you're saying you can answer something the Duderino said he couldn't because it was a non sequitur.
If you've got steps, I'm willing to hear you out.
Start out by imagining that you are literally on a huge huge tree but there is fog above you (the future) and fog just below you (the past). If the tree were more like the size of a normal tree then imagine you are an ant on the tree. The fog is totally thick everywhere at altitudes of one centimeter below you and one centimeter above you. You were born into this condiction and you know nothing else. You don't realize you are on a tree. You can only look in that one horizontal plane (the present). These little bits of the branches around you look to you like little islands having nothing to do with each other. These are the species. As time goes on nothing much changes. You will be dead before the height of the fog rises more than a centimeter. Imagine that the branches have unique different shapes, some sqaurish, some more circular and the smaller scale details are really different from island to island. The shapes of the little islands seem static and you are so used to the shapes of each that they seem god-given and each have special meaning to you. that's "elephant" over there, that's "rabbit" over there etc. You naturally fall into an essentialist way of thinking about these static shapes (each shape represents a biological morphology).
That's step one. Can you picture it?
I can picture it. But I sense you're doing what some have already started doing, which is to attack religion instead of explaining evolution. This sounds a lot like how some Mormons try to legitimize their existence by bashing the insanity of Catholicism or other beliefs. And people don't believe things are God-given simply because they cannot see beyond fog. At least I don't.
EA
Kevin - different populations face different ecological pressures and chances, and as a result not everything evolves stepwise in the same direction. There are numerous ways in which a population can change and still fill a locally optimal survival niche.
Can you name a way? Specifically, why species X would evolve into homo sapien while its ancestors remained essentially monkey-like? You refer to ecological pressure and chance. What ecological pressures made humans become what we are? I cannot even begin to imagine how that would even make sense. What in natural selection could explain why an monkey-like animal would gradually lose its ability to survive in the wilderness? Meaning, lack of hair for warmth, smaller feet, shorter arms for a diminished capacity for climbing trees, etc.
I understand the logic behind the NS concept but I do not see anyone providing any plausible scenario as to how this could account for man evolving from ape-like creatures. If someone could name a plausible reason why humans needed to adapt to walking upright, and grow hair primarily on the head, etc., then that would be a step in the right direction.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
