Taupey wrote:
MONKEY wrote:
A video I uploaded just. I'm rambling on about evolution and creationists and stuff. More specifically about the whole creationist mindset of "humans are superior to everything else", and how stupid it is (IMO)
This is a great video Monkey. I liked what you had to say.
Agreed, well done. It does seem that pride is a factor in the denial of some people to accept their biological cousins. I wrote a song about
Evolution that includes the lyrics
"Could it be you're too proud to admit you're related to a monkey?"
You also talk about how just because different animals are different doesn't necessarily mean one species is superior to another. In the film
Night at the museum there's a scene where the guy is slapping that monkey and Teddy Roosevelt chastises him, saying "Who's evolved? That comment was a bit misleading but probably reflects the common understanding of evolution from Teddy Roosevelt's time. It goes by the old model of evolution being a ladder with higher species better than lower species, as if humans were the goal of all of evolution.
No, our species adapted to its environment, and monkeys adapted to theirs. The monkey is just as evolved as the human. I got a kick a few years ago from reading a scientific report comparing the chimp genome to the human one. It suggested that since our split from a common ancestor, chimp DNA had more mutations than human DNA so in one sense chimps are MORE evolved than humans! Of course the changes in our DNA from the common ancestor we share with chimps were obviously important ones. If not for them, we wouldn't be who we are.
Another report from a few years ago that greatly tickled me was that since the initial split from a common human-chimp ancestor about seven million years ago, DNA studies indicate there was some interbreeding between the populations of proto-humans and proto-chimps for about another million years before the populations became divergent enough where interbreeding stopped. So not only are chimps more evolved than humans, but for a million years our ancestors were getting it on with their ancestors. LOL! This paragraph emphasizes another important factor in understanding how evolution works: individual organisms don't evolve; populations do.
That doesn't mean that God, even the God of the Bible, didn't do this. But the evidence clearly shows that if He did, He made it LOOK like we share common ancestry with chimpanzees and other living things. Human chromosome 2 is practically a "smoking gun" showing this. It shows many clear signs of being two ape chromosomes fused together. We even know which are the corresponding chromosomes in chimps, and exactly where the fusion took place in the molecules.
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"When you ride over sharps, you get flats!"--The Bicycling Guitarist, May 13, 2008
Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 29 Nov 2010, 7:33 pm, edited 4 times in total.