Dear Glen and Christine, re: the missing half-monkeys

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

About seven million years ago man and chimpanzee shared a common ancestor. (Something similar to Ardipithecus, Sahelanthropus or Orrorin.)

That common ancestor had a smaller brain than we do.

It also had a smaller brain than a chimpanzee.

There is nothing in evolution that intrinsically favors complexity or intelligence. Quite the opposite, in fact. Since multiplying your DNA is the name of the evolution game the winners are mostly microbes, insects, algae, etc.

“Advanced” creatures like us are anomalies. At some point intelligence became a “sex-selected trait” among ape-like creatures and we got “arms race” style runaway brain development.

That arms race started before the human/chimp split, or even the human/ape split. Why else do all the great apes (of which we are one) have much bigger brains than our ancestors?

If humans did not exist then an alien explorer would look at chimps and say, “These creatures are very smart… right on the cusp of something.” The alien would study fossils and see that the chimp brain had grown a great deal in 7 million years—a mere blink in geological time.

And the alien would note that if explorer’s returned in 2-3 million years there was a good chance that chimps, obviously facing some evolutionary pressure toward bigger brains, would be sentient.

Monkeys (sic) turning into something like people… right before our eyes!

_____

And more to the point, the fossil record is full of a wild variety of monkey-men—hundreds of 'em! There were even different species of man, like Neanderthals. So why aren’t they still around to gawk at? Because we ate them. We, the winners, eliminated all competing hominids. And atoday we are doing quite a job of eliminating the great apes.

Nothing can evolve into something like man in a world full of men because we would not allow it!

[Crunchy Frog]

1. I thought Glen and Christine WERE the missing half-monkeys.

[pinboy3niner]

2. Yeah, but if scientists are creating mice w/human brains...

...it could still explain a Delaware U.S. candidate and a radio/TV demagogue with monkey brains. :)

"They are -- they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment."

--Christine O'Donnell

[Bitwit1234]

3. If they would stop and look the next time the visit fox

they'd see all the half monkeys this country has.

[gratuitous]

4. There's nothing wrong with having a fifth grade understanding of evolution

That is, if you're in the fifth grade. Evolution does NOT say that humans evolved from chimps; it says that they share a common ancestor. The commonly misstated position, transferred to strictly human terms, would posit that a person is descended from his or her contemporaneous 10th cousin. This is patent nonsense. A person and that person's 10th cousin are not "descended" from one another; they share a common parent 10 generations back.

But it serves some larger purpose for the nincompoops to pretend that humans "descended" from other contemporary primates, rather than sharing a common ancestor. I do not know what that larger purpose is, but I suspect it has something to do with the ongoing assault against public education, and the vital interest some forces in our society have in making sure the general population is as dumb as possible.

[damntexdem]

5. What missing half monkeys? After all, you reference two of them right there.

;-)

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

6. Thus equaling one monkey