This the tenth video in the PBS/”It’s Okay to be Smart” series—and that series can’t end too soon for me—is a response to that perennial creationist question, “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” The no-brainer response is decent, but it neglects the important part of the answer: both modern apes and modern humans evolved from a common ancestor that was not the same as any modern ape or hominin. That’s an important thing to say! We no longer see the ape-y ancestors that gave rise to modern humans, chimps, gorillas, and so on. In fact, the video’s answer, “There are still apes because apes are good at being apes,” doesn’t really answer the question. Apes are good at being apes so long as their environment doesn’t change so radically that apes go extinct.
But in maybe in just a few generations, it won’t be possible to ask this question, as there will be only one species of ape left: H. sapiens.
It’s all just very confusing, conflating, as the other videos in the series have done, a number of diverse issues.
One question I’ve asked creationists and their intelligent design offspring for which I’ve never received a satisfactory answer:
“If humans are intelligently designed then why are there still Christians ?”.
I never get an answer to this one:
“If humans were created by gods, why would there still be gods?”
There is a sad/poignant way to answer the creationist question. Between the shared ancestor of chimps and humans were several million years of successful homo genus hominids, of which we are the only remaining one. Except for the contributions in our DNA from neanderthal and denisovans, nothing biological remains of the once many (or at least several) other species in our genus.
So, we can rephrase the question in a somewhat poignant way: “Q: if we evolved from earlier homos, why are there still earlier homos?” “A: There aren’t.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but a rather depressing one.
To Jerry’s comment
I was thinking that is unduly pessimistic. It’s quite plausible that there will be no wild apes within a century, but I think it unlikely that there won’t be captive populations. And given the improvement in captivity conditions over the last half-century, it’s likely that their conditions of living won’t be that bad. Not free, but if you talk to the inmates of Death Row you’ll find a lot of people keen on life imprisonment, given the alternative. (Besides, most people in the zoological business recognise that stress and discomfort are bad for the health of your charges, and expensive to cure ; better to prevent.)
The big problem in a century will be pointing at the chimp-inna-cage as a cousin of ours, and being answered “but at the Creayshun Museeum they’ve got Gene Engineered (under Divine Guidance, Praise The Lord!) dinosaurs-inna-harness, just like it says in the BuyBile!”
To take your idea down Diana’s rhetorical path, “If we’re evolved from earlier humanoids, why are there earlier humanoids still around, like Africans (there remains a strong element of racism in all fundamentalist religions), Jews (undisputed predecessors of Christians), Australian Abborigines in the DreamTime, and that state of the Inuit in Northern Canada?”
I’m going to cross my fingers and hope eco-tourism wins out over environmental destruction, at least for some rainforest and savannah areas. Maybe that’s laughably optimistic but hey, I’ve done some eco tourism already, and in the future I plan to do more. They want to separate first world fools from their money for the privilege of gawking at local trees and pesky monkeys? I’m proud to be that fool, if it results in them keeping the trees and pesky monkeys.
In theory “eco-tourism” is fine. It may even help the locals (“natives” implies a lot more than a couple of hundred years of colonial records can suggest) to sustain that 3rd child per family. For a generation. Or even two (one of which has already been using transhumance as a method of birth control).
And in an ideal world, it would probably be an effective technique.
Sadly, that’s not this world. And pending magical improvements in recycling and energy use, I don’t see that being this world.
But it’s a “go for” target.
If we use stone artifacts as a tracer of hominim technological abilities, we see a rather chilling pattern. First comes the use of stone flakes as tools. Then the hand axe, then better hand axes, then the hafted spear used for short range thrusting, then smaller and lighter spears for throwing, atlatls, and arrowheads.
Along the way, as fancier tools appear that increase the efficiency of killing at a distance, the makers of the old tools disappear. It does not take long to imagine why that might be.
The other option is that the old tool makers learned to make the new tools as well.
I haven’t read Mr Pinker’s “Better Angels” book ; I would be fairly surprised if that observation had escaped him.
Question : do you have a Civil War (UK or US) hand weapon on your person? Do I have a Cold War era flame thrower or RPG about my person? And even if we did, might we not resort to 20.5th century disagreement solving by competitive zymurgy (last man standing wins ; prepares hangover cure for loser).
Which is Pinker’s point, about solving disputes with brains instead of cudgels.
(In case I’m not the only one who had to lookup the definition)
zymurgy: the study or practice of fermentation in brewing, winemaking, or distilling.
Thanks – you saved me!
As [someone] mentions in a later thread – a subject calling out for a user-sourced online encyclopaedia called “Hicipedia”.
I find it curious that we shared the world with two descendants from another Homo species, H. erectus, up until ~ 14 kyrs ago, the Hobbits and the Red Deer Cave people. [ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151217151544.htm ]
By the way, at least 50 % of those species went extinct due to natural causes.
“By the way, at least 50 % of those species went extinct due to natural causes”.
Competition with (or predation by) H. sapiens (or between other hominids) surely is a ‘natural’ cause. When did we stop being a part of nature?
I think the question, “Why are there still apes?” is only popular because it is less than 140 characters. And I am beginning to think less than half of humanity can understand anything unless it can be written in 140 characters or less.
I fear very much that a few generations after the remainder of the apes go extinct, the big-headed one will too.
This would not bother me quite as much — it’s kind of like democracy, except instead of the government we collectively deserve, we get the species fate we collectively fashion — except that “collectively” happens to include my two beautiful children.
Television was, is, and will always be *entertainment*. Don’t get your hopes up!
Truthfully, I can’t stand that series or the actor, who strikes me as being a jackass.
The commentator on this series is Joe Hanson. He has a Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in cell and molecular biology. He has a blog at itsokaytobesmart.com/. As far as I can tell, he writes these videos by himself.
Probably an argument for assistance from an education and/ or PR person. It is OK to be smart (agreed), but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good communicator of $COMPLEX_SUBJECT$. There are times when humanities people do deserve their crust. And even some water. But they’ll have to work for the lime juice, and I don’t tell them why! [MUWAHAHAHAHAH]
I refuse to watch the video.
1. We didn’t evolve from monkeys.
2. We didn’t evolve from apes. We are apes. According to Linnaeus (by way of Wikipedia) we’re the type species (which seems a little strange to me — I’d pick chimpanzee).
It is ok to say that we evolved from monkeys and from apes, and that we are monkeys and apes as well. It is all a matter of letting those traditional terms be used as more formal taxonomic terms. Likewise we evolved from primates and we are primates, mammals, etc.
I take “evolved from apes” to mean “evolved from the common ancestor of the ape clade”. If it doesn’t mean that, then is there any value of X for which it’s meaningful to say we evolved from X?
My point is that we didn’t evolve “from” apes. We’re just another member of the ape clade. It’s like saying that tigers evolved from cats. The notion that we evolved “from” apes implies that we’re something else, something higher, something apart.
So if I understand you correctly, then we didn’t evolve “from” fish either, or from protozoans, or from anything else. Which seems a somewhat counterintuitive view of evolution.
While it may be counterintuitive to you, it isn’t to me. The “evolving from” meme is tempting, but misleading. It evokes the discredited great chain of being. You can certainly speak of common ancestors. That’s fine. But humans are firmly in the ape clade. If we evolved from apes, then so did chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons, and they have the same claim to that status as we do.
I’m happy to grant them that status. I just don’t see how you can draw cladograms or talk meaningfully about the origin of species without invoking “come from” relationships, at least implicitly.
If you have a clear understanding of common ancestry the “evolved from” notion makes sense. Unfortunately, the creationists don’t have that understanding. We evolved from something fishlike, but so did every species of fish alive today, and they’re as different from that fishlike ancestor as we are, so it’s problematical at best to say that we evolved from fish. When one says we evolved from apes, the typical creationist takes that to mean that we evolved from some currently living or recently living ape species, which is far from the truth.
But if we say we didn’t evolve from apes (or from anything else), what do you suppose creationists will take that to mean? That we’ve come around to their way of thinking?
Potholer54 (YouTube) commented on this issue with a language analogy: given the existence of the Afrikaans language in South Africa, why is Dutch still spoken in Holland?
Both languages share a common ancestor in 17th C Dutch, and both have evolved in usage since that time, albeit Afrikaans more so. In fact, some colloquial usages of Afrikaans are equally as unintelligible to both Afrikaans and Dutch speakers!
Biologists broadly understand evolution as a change in allele frequency within a population of organisms, over time. To my experience in conversation with those holding a non-evolutionary worldview, change over time and descent with modification are mind-bending concepts, especially if those in question haven’t swum in the waters of natural selection, to paraphrase Dawkins.
A remedy?
Loads of biological field and theoretical research, labwork and an understanding that “god” or “disembodied spirits / consciousness” only present an infinite regress if offered as an explanation, and are irrelevant to the scientific endeavour, as made clear by Laplace.
Happy New Year and thanks, Jerry, for the brilliant webpage!
The word “still” in that question betrays a whole lot of misunderstanding and wrongitude.
There aren’t “still” monkeys. Modern monkeys have evolved, too. They aren’t the same as the common ancestor from which we both evolved. We didn’t evolve from modern monkeys because they didn’t exist yet.
Good point
To be fair to the vlogger, he refers to the tree and reject the non-biological “ladder” idea.
But yes, a more direct reference to the last ancestor between Homo and Pan had been nice!
It might just be optimistic to think we will still be around in another 1 or 2 hundred years. Possibly Europe will continue but there are certainly doubts here in the U.S. Just a couple more states going red and you would have a good case for extinction. Call it extinction 5.5 – self inflicted
“Apes are good at being apes so long as their environment doesn’t change so radically that apes go extinct.”
BINGO!
I could only add that environments don’t always have to change radically, only enough to put the species on a slippery slope. Species may not always be able to change enough to outpace technology, as in the case of the passenger pigeon. In the case of apes, technology is hitting them with poaching and land development. It may be necessary to raise apes in captivity until Homo sap wises up and restores lost wild habitat and effectively stops Homo moronensis from killing them for a tiny profit. Of course, the most sapient of the Homos need to realize that the poachers need an alternative, such as getting paid more to protect them.
Test post for Billy Connolly 🍌 U+1F34C Banana (boots – Connelly)
So, why didn’t that work 5 minute ago?
Because HTML is still evolving? 😉
cr
If the U.S. evolved from Great Britain, why does Great Britain still exist?
Answer me that, historians!
“both modern apes and modern humans evolved from a common ancestor that was not the same as any modern ape or hominin. That’s an important thing to say!”
I totally agree!
Actually, the extinction of intermediate varieties is the most astonishing upshot
of natural selection. If all ancestors were still alive, the boundary of “humanity” would be ill-defined: There would be no observable basis to establish clearly who is a “human being” and define “human rights”.
Richard Dawkins claims: “I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. […] But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live.” And he stresses that: “one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives”.
Undoubtedly, the key chapter of this lesson is the disappearance of intermediate varieties, a fact which Richard Dawkins refers to as a “fortunate accident”, one of these apparently ordinary things that are “more magical […] than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle”.
“Creationism” demonstrates lack of imagination:
Evolution is not only true; it is the smartest form of creation after all.