You are descended from your great-great-great grandparents, right? They're not still around, but there's a good chance you have fourth or fifth cousins also descended from the same couple. They probably don't look as much like you as your siblings do.
Now, try imagining your 50th cousins, descended from a couple who lived in about the year 1000 (I could be one of them!), you wouldn't recognise them as family.
Your 500th cousins would have had a common ancestor living about 9000 years BC and be spread all over the world.
Keep going back, and imagine your 5000th cousins, or your 50000th cousins. Some of them might be quite a bit hairier than you and live in trees.
The common ancestors and their peers have long ago turned to dust, or (very rarely) fossils, but their descendants, who all looked very much like their parents, now look very different from their distant ancestors and very different to each other.
@OlderAndWiser Shutting down debate isn't a sign of intellectual strength, I'd kindly encourage you to rethink your choice.
Perhaps for some dislike condescension but I reserve the right to use it for those who reject reason. Such people are immune to rational argument and lack logical coherence.
I've come to personally find ignorance masked by certainty utterly revolting. Such people are the very definition of unreason.
It's one thing to be misinformed or to not understand something and have a willingness to learn, it's quite another to be a victim of the Dunning- Krueger effect and refuse to acknowledge it.
I'm not speaking without experience, having married a homeschooled conservative fundamentalist Christian years ago, and personally knowing many more.
Three possibilities. 1) They were brainwashed while homeschooled. 2) They are conservative Christians and don't believe in logic, rational thought, or the scientific method. 3) A combination of 1 & 2.
@holdem4884 You seem to enjoy criticizing others so you can claim the moral high ground for yourself. Condescension is an extremely unattractive trait. Goodbye!
Cats and dogs live about 10 years on average (it varies across breeds), and yet extremely selective breeding has created hundreds of new, unique species in just the last 50 years alone.
Evolution takes place primarily during reproduction - an animal is born with a genetic mutation, and that mutation is either helpful or harmful. When it's harmful, this reduces the chances that the person with that mutation will survive to breed, so that mutation will likely die out. When the mutation is beneficial - improved eye-sight, stronger muscles, more resistance to disease, being able to stand more up-right, or whatever, that person is more likely to survive, and more likely to reproduce and pass on that mutation. Over time and many generations, the mutation spreads widely through that population until it becomes the new normal.
These things happen constantly, and we can see this behavior in things as small as single-cell organisms and as complex as birds, fish, and mammals, including humans. Evolution is a FACT.
What EXACTLY we evolved from is a theory - we can make good guesses, but we don't have enough technology or evidence to provide PROOF yet. Evolution can be PROVEN, but the original sources can (currently) only be speculated on, though it's very informed speculation, made by specialists who know more than almost anyone about that particular field. It's also a field of study that isn't (yet) overly political, unlike things like, say, vaccines, where massive amount of profit dollars are at stake, and where governments collude with corporations to profit in return for favors.
One of the big problems with science is that a whole lot of it is government-funded, making it government-controlled. And areas that have tons of money, such as medicine, are HEAVILY influenced and controlled by government, so it's much harder to trust the "science", because it's a LONG way from pure science. Anthropology and evolutionary biology have relatively little influence or money potential, so they tend to be much more pure science - still not perfect, but miles better than other areas.
Want a good example of government vs. industry (where industry is pure science, because they need to accomplish a mission quickly and on budget)? NASA has been trying to build a rocket and capsule system that can go to the moon as well as the international space station. They've spent $6B and nearly 20 years, and their system doesn't work - to the point where they've had to contract out all of their missions for the next several years to SpaceX - money beyond the development funds for this rocket of theirs.
Meanwhile, in half that time, SpaceX built their Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy systems for $2B or so, which feature self-landing, reusable rocket bodies, the only US-based system certified for carrying humans to orbit, and SpaceX flies slightly more than 1 mission per week on average, for a tenth of what NASA will spend per launch of its system.
At what age does an ape reach sexual maturity? I would not think it takes longer than two years. Not sure. How many generations can an female ape produce.(great grand children, great great grandchildren) Each generations offers a chance for mutations and if they are successful mutations they are anchored in the DNA until they become a disadvantage. Longevity is not the issue. Early menarche starts the process and as long as a food source is available, the only thing that stops the organism is disease and aging. A human's natural lifespan such as in medieval times or in aboriginal settings was about 45 years Modern healthcare has extended that to about 78. Consider bacteria. Replication rates are measured in seconds. Think about how quickly they can mutate to avoid susceptibility to an antibiotic. One of the factors that hastened our intelligence was that we began to live long enough to pass along what we had learned to the next generation. Otherwise, each generation has to start from scratch
I can only hope you're trolling and not serious. Otherwise, it's the dumbest question I've ever read.
If Google disagrees then it must be the gospel truth. Forget about actual scientific evidence and research, we should all just rely on Google search results for our information. I suppose next you're going to tell me that the earth is flat because Google said so?
The fact of the matter is that humans did not evolve from apes. Rather, humans and apes share a common ancestor. It's basic evolutionary biology, something that you clearly didn't bother to learn before making such an idiotic statement. So, before you embarrass yourself any further, I suggest you actually educate yourself on the topic rather than blindly following Google's search results.
It is false. We didn't come from primates. Think about it. Saber Tooth Tigers are ancestors are ancestors of today's tigers and the former ceases to exist, plus there are skeletal remains for evidence. Just like Wooly Mammoths don't exist anymore because they are modern elephants. Humans coming from primates didn't happen no matter how much SOME scientists wish for it. The ones that don't believe it are often censored. Just like the Big Bang Theory that was widely accepted among scientists, but recently proven WRONG.
Lots of times throughout history scientists have been proven wrong. Same goes for the global warming nonsense and all of the repeated predictions that have constantly been WRONG.
But no matter how many times they are wrong, many people will still believe them because they are ignorant, illogical, and don't look at actual historical evidence/results.
Longer life slows evolution, not the other way around. It's by generations, not years. A million generations might take a million years, or it might take 50 million years. So the species that lives one year will evolve far more quickly than the one that lives 50 years. An insect with a lifespan of only five weeks will evolve ten times faster than one with a lifespan of a year.
in the ancient Middle East, the average person died at 25 so there was a time that apes lived longer than humans. My uncle told me humans were designed to die at 30 but because we have medical technology and innovations we are able to extend that to a hundred and more. I know when I was younger, finding a guy was very important to me even though I never felt ready to be a mother. Now, eating tacos matter more to me than finding a husband.
@HaveNoName a duck online told me the years in biblical times were measured in lunar cycles so if Lamech lived 777 years, it means he lived through 777 lunar cycles, multiply 777 by 28 days and divide by 365.25 to translate the lunar cycles into years
Low lifespan means faster evolution, humans didn't live much without modern medicine, that's why women lose the ability to have children so soon, they not expected to live much.
they reproduced, their kids reproduced, their grandkids reproduced, etc.. and slowly over the course of those millions of years they slowly evolved closer and closer to humans (very slowly). that's how it happened no adam & eve lol or whatever the fuck you believe
It's called evolution. Indeed, the average lifespan for humans is changing even in my lifetime. When I was a kid, I knew no one in their 80s except a few celebrities. 90s were pretty much unheard of except for a few in the 1980s like George Burns. Now, lots of people are living longer.
The flu virus evolves pretty quick every year, so does other viruses. It doesn't take very long, but in the grand scheme of things, a few million or billion years can created millions of variations.
12.2K opinions shared on Society & Politics topic.
Availability of modern medicine. From the 1500s onward, till around the year 1800, life expectancy throughout Europe hovered between 30 and 40 years of age. Then modern medicine began to emerge.
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