How many generations did it take for evolution...

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...to produce humans? This is "science" (politics) after all, so who / which museum / university has the highest number of extrapolated lifeform models, based on the fossil record, extending backward down the supposed evolutionary ladder from homo sapiens?

I want to know the number of generations it took for humans to evolve. If you don't know, guess.

Can you clarify what you call the start point? Or do you want people to extrapolate from single celled critters?

5 hundred thousand years to go from Homo hieaburgers to homo sapien.

so divide that by 25

=

twenty thousand generations.

well it would be alot, espically on the uniceller organism side.......

If you go all the way back to single cell organisms the number would be ridiculously large. Since you'd have about a billion years of generations lasting only a few days at most (probably much less than that, more like a few hours).

How long is a generation? Let's assume it's a very high estimate of 20 years to reproductive age. 4 billion divided by 20 years is 200 million. So, at least 20 million and probably alot more, since at the small mammal stage, reproductive age was probably less than a year, and it tends to get less the simpler the animal is.

What does population growth look like over all this time then?

Has life reached the steady-state of the sigmoid curve yet?

Three.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ0epRjfGLw[/youtube]

i spoke to my father about this and apparently it's 894

The question is misleading. The line between "human" and "pre-human" is fuzzy and we have no way of making an absolute demarcation.

well, this is science, yes, also, related to metaphysics and theology, but I don't know what politics have to do with it.

Vaguely, I could say that, the process of human evolution would have started about 8 million years ago (I may be mistaken) and the homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. I don't know how many generations does that take.

If you are interested in this subject, Richard Dawkins wrote a great book called "The Ancestor's Tale". It starts with humans and then goes back in time to each juncture with a common ancestor of both humans and another living animal.

I once read in a story book that human evolution was all just a myth...

I think it is possible. When did the first creature that could breed with modern man and produce viable offspring emerge? Given that this creature would be pre-historical by all estimations, we do not have any major problems with defining "human" due to a discontinuity. However, breeding is a common demarcation for species I think. The major issue is that the question could mostly be guessed at for most people here as although some have a broad idea of history, and the question of how many generations are between me and the year 2000 BC is a harder question then I might care to answer for a casual question on a forum as the number would be large, and breeding habits had some variability between cultures. If the number of generations between me and the year 2000 BC, a relatively clear point in time, using the human species which has a breeding age range somewhere close to between 13 and 35(rough guess), is difficult, then if the first year is unknown and the age range is very very unclear with some creatures breeding in less than a day, then any guessing effort becomes rather absurd.

First of all, what the devil is a "hieaburger"? Second of all, I do believe that Heidelbergensis is classified as being the ancestor of Neanderthals, but that they come after the last common ancestor of both neanderthals and sapiens, regardless of what the picture says. I wish I could find my physical anthro book about now

You don't go out for fast food much, do you?