Are we apes?

Eh... Clicked too soon and somehow got that in the last post.

The common ancestor they share isn't ape or man - it's long extinct. It's certainly closer to both ape and man than that thing, yes, but he is still essentially right.

I don't like to use "advanced" in terms of evolution, but they are distant relatives of that wolf-like creature, just as we are distant relatives of an ape-like creature, so no, it's not nonsense.

But yes, I suppose one should make the distinction that the modern wolves have nothing to do with it, save, perhaps, that both the modern wolves and the dolphins share a placental mammalian relative.

It's not that humans aren't apes necessarily, it's just that there are quite a few anatomical features humans have that literally no other ape has.

What's weird about it is these features don't appear gradually in the fossil record, a specimen simply has them almost fully or doesn't have them at all. Some people exaggerate this and say humans aren't apes, but the truth is there's a fairly wide gap between humans and all other primates.

>The ancient chicken was born from a dinosaur that wasn't a chicken in any way.
Well that doesn't make sense. There has to be a spectrum of "chicken-ness", where each successive inherited mutation becomes more like a chicken.

Though that still calls into question at what point a non-chicken laid a chicken, but at least the spectrum concept has a spot for a 0-value of chicken-ness.

was your dad an ape?

humans make humans

apes make apes

for all their "theories" they can never explain this simple truth

You don't generally get gradual changes between species, as slight improvements tend to outbreed or integrate quite quickly, and then, particularly in the case of humans, you get into bottlenecks of geographic and genetic isolation.

...or at least that's the conventional explanation for the stair stepping effect - there are of course, others.

It's really not important enough to be this pedantic about. It's not exactly wrong to think of ourselves as apes.

None of it really matters. Evolution is a nice story, and that's about it as far as it being applicable to our everyday lives. Various psychos will use it as an excuse to act like an animal, but they were going to acts like animals regardless.

Being speciest and saying we were created uniquely by God isn't any worse.

Well, there's problems with both approaches.

Medical and research wise, the god thing is of course problematic, while socially, the lack there of can be disconcerting.

Social animals don't put up with members behaving "like animals" either, from their own perspective. Coyotes, will, for instance, kill or remove problematic members. (Which is why if you see a lone one you should likely steer clear, as if it isn't a scout, it maybe rabid.)

There's something to be said for remembering part of being a functional human being is rising above your baser instincts, and that we surpassed the natural selection rut the rest of the animal kingdom is in by acquiring the ability pass on more information more reliably through non-genetic means.

On the other hand, that lack of spiritual dictate leads everyone free to question everything, and humans being humans, they'll often assume they know better than their ancestors did, without fully understanding all the nuances that made them choose to live the way they did, sometimes leading less to advancement, and more to nightmarish awakening to simple truths abandoned as "primitive", when they forget their historical ancestors, while they may not have had the same mountain of information to work with, weren't actually any less intelligent or wise.

But again, it's also kinda depressing to think that our creator would be, well, so uncreative. I mean, yes, there's a wide variety of life on the planet, but there's so many slight variants on the same theme, that it's clear that if life wasn't allowed to simply develop on its own from a single source, someone got stuck in a rut. Seems that in a world created by omnipotent magic all at once, every creature should be entirely unique and perfect, rather than, for instance, the same old four limbs, head and spine shit over and over again with all sorts of incidental design flaws.

It would be "chicken-like" but not at all a "chicken." Hell, the last mutation may have very well been real feathers instead of proto-feathers.

I believe Darwin's version. There's no reason to think we're different from the other apes simply because we're hairless.