Question for Evolutionists??

Question

Have we actually found fossils that are transitions from an ape to a human??
I dont understand how you can believe that a human, can come from an ape because our DNA is sooo similar, 1% difference right? well we're obviously different than apes, so that 1% difference is a HUGE difference because i dont have fur all over my body, and i dont act like an ape.
another thing is where did these apes come from? I dont understand how this could be a random occurance. Our bodies are so complicated we still dont understand all of it.
I'm not trying to offend anyone, i just want to know more because right now i dont buy it.

Answer 1

There are *so* many good answers here ... please, please read Richard's answer carefully. It is *very* good, and is not insulting at all. Likewise Jessica G's answer (and link).



But OMG, please be careful when reading the post by Bryan R (who has since changed his handle to 'science.fact.). It is using the incredibly dishonest technique of "quote mining" and "quoting out of context". The misquoting of people like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins is deplorable.



Example: Bryan R takes a passage from Dawkin's "Blind Watchmaker" and leaves the last sentence dangling:



Bryan R's edited version of Dawkins quote: "Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation..." (and there Bryan cuts off Dawkins in mid-sentence).



Bryan R is deliberately omitting most of that paragraph, which says precisely the OPPOSITE. The paragraph (I have the book right here) actually ends like this:



Dawkins actual sentence: "Both schools of thought [the two different schools of evolutionary theory] would agree that the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject that alternative." (p. 230.)



So Bryan R strategically omitted the beginning and ending of Dawkins' sentence, especially that last phrase "AND BOTH WOULD REJECT THAT ALTERNATIVE" [divine creation]. Dawkins was specifically saying that both schools of evolutionary thought are unanimous in REJECTING creationism. And Bryan R manufactured this into a passage that implies that Dawkins himself now AGREES with the creationists! This is the type of deceitful tactics that are commonplace among some creationists.



I could go pgf by pgf through Bryan R's post and show similar deceits and/or misunderstandings of science (e.g. that scientists date rocks only by the kinds of fossils they contain ... not true. Or that the claim that human footprints along side dinosaur footprints "has been verified" ... not true (it has be thoroughly discredited) ... or that Don Patton has a PhD or is a reputable scientist (not true, not even *close* to being in the same category of Harvard and Oxford biology professors Gould (now deceased) and Dawkins).



But this gets boring and does not answer your question. I just had to call Bryan R on these tactics. He is insulting your intelligence.



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Now to your questions:



"Have we actually found fossils that are transitions from an ape to a human?"



Yes. Although I have to clarify the term 'ape'. First, this was not a transition from any modern species of ape (chimp, gorilla, etc.) but a common ancestor of the modern apes, including humans. It's unclear whether we would call this early ancestor an 'ape' ... it's often hard to put modern labels on a long extinct species. Second, humans *are* apes ... this is just a classification (basically a primate without a tail, but there's more to it) and is no more insulting than saying that "humans are primates" or "humans are mammals." It's just a classification.



For transitional fossils for humans:

http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC050.html



"I dont understand how you can believe that a human, can come from an ape because our DNA is sooo similar, 1% difference right? well we're obviously different than apes, so that 1% difference is a HUGE difference because i dont have fur all over my body, and i dont act like an ape."



Actually, it may be as much as 3% or 4% ... but it's still tiny. And yes that is enough explain all the differences we see. Humans DO have fur all over their body, just less of it. The brains of a human is not fundamentally a different brain than that of apes ... it's just bigger ... a *lot* bigger (which accounts for the behavior, and the language). Our arms aren't *different* arms ... just different proportions ... longer or shorter forearm bones, bicep muscles, etc. Even our feet and legs have muscles and structures that have no function in humans but are essential for grasping with the feet in other primates. But the real point is that 96% or 97% similarity in our genes ... same basic structures, same blood proteins, same digestive enzymes, same proteins in the eye used for color vision, same hormone structures, all almost identical proteins that vary in a couple of molecules here and there. More distant species (like monkeys) have the same proteins, but with a few more variations ... and so on ... the further away on the evolutionary tree, the more of these subtle molecular differences. This is not explained simply by "common creator" ... these all follow the *exact* patterns we would expect if all species were related by common ancestry.



For more information, see "How to Compare Genetic Distance Among Species":

http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html



I hope that helps. You are asking good questions. The problem you may find is that "evolutionists" (a questionable term ... I prefer "scientists" or "biologists" as most do believe that evolution is the best theory going) not only don't balk at these questions ... but they have *very* detailed answers.

Answer 2

Firstly, I encourage you to visit the link I listed as a source and see the picture of a Neanderthal skull. The big jaw looks fairly ape-ish, no?



Also, you DO have fur all over your body, it's just not as pronounced. Do you not shave your legs, your armpits? Everywhere except your palms and bottom of your feet is covered in tiny hairs. You also act like an ape, only a more intelligent one who has gained the ability to walk upright. Apes are able to use tools and they have opposable thumbs, two characteristics that are quite integral to our human existence.



In animals besides apes and humans, there is a lot of other evidence for evolution, such as the presence of vestigial structures. And example of a vestigial structure is the human appendix--we don't use it, but it's still there. Actually the only good it does us is to get inflamed sometimes. Anyhow, these unused body parts come from ancestor species that DID use them, and there definitely are fossils demonstrating this.



If the complexity of life seems like it must have been creating by a being, let me give you a dose of logic. Many theists believe "This is so beautiful, something must have designed all this." Most theists would also agree that their God is beautiful and complicated, so by that logic something had to make him too, right? Well what about this other maker, the God of God? Who made him? If you think existence has to be designed, you end up with an infinite chain of Gods and creations.

Answer 3

Yes, there are fossils of individual animals that have characteristics intermediate between modern humans and common ancestors of extant apes.



Intermediate brain sizes, tooth shapes, skull proportions, degrees of bipedality, overall morphology.



A snowflake is complicated, that doesn't mean there have to be little elves/angels/imps/faires assembling or carving them in the clouds.



There's a difference between don't understand and can't understand. Saying that we can't understand something because we don't understand something else is either lazy or dishonest.

Evolution isn't random, mutation is. Those randomly derived traits that help survival are perpetuated the traits that reduce survival rates are slowly weeded out.



You do have hair all over your body, just not thick enough to notice. There are plenty of uncomfortable (from a creationists POV) behavioral similarities between humans and apes. A vast body of anthropological studies that show human-like behavior among nonhuman primates. Jane Goodall's research on chimpanzees, Diane Fossey's work with mountain gorillas are two standouts among a very busy field of research.

Answer 4

There are transitional forms, many of them, between our common ancestors with apes. They do have fossils. Look it up-I'd recommend futuyma's book Evoloutionary Biology for a good primer on evolution.

And the difference is less than 1%.

We actually have many similar social systems, when compared to apes. And we do have fur all over our bodies--look at your arms and legs. Do you see hair? It's not super thick, but it's there.



And if you think it's weird that we got, from random circumstances, the formation of barely living cells, and then slightly more complex life forms, and so on and so on, until we got us...



THINK HOW MUCH WEIRDER AND UNLIKELY IT IS THAT GOD RANDOMLY APPEARED FIRST.

And then created everything else, with his randomnly bestowed absolute powers. That's what I can't buy, and if you're assuming linearity of time, you really do need God to just randomly appear from nothing at some point with no intermediate forms, before anything else.

Talk about a leap of faith!

Answer 5

I would have to think that in this term would be micro evolution. It's all about the mutations of our genetics and a combination of the environmental factors. Modern apes and the apes from a few million years ago have separate genetic pathways.



After so long of branching out our species and the others we become different as do the apes. Like I said the evolution theory is all about genetics, environmental factors, and the science of things like anthropology, paleontology, and molecular biology backs up these theories. But that is why they call it a theory.



This is a very great question. Although I don't think I could convince you otherwise. I hope I was helpful in some sort of way.



Also, I hope you really don't believe that god merely placed animals and man on this earth making us pop out of nowhere...now that is just a silly concept of our evolution.

Answer 6

First off there are humans that are very fury !!! Second ever watch wrestling or ultimate cage brawling or whatever that is. Pretty much running around grunting and smashing heads. I have also watched an ape use tools to retrieve his meal. I have seen a baby monkey of some kind make something to play with and have blasty with it. My kids only play with what my hypocrisy purchases. They seem like they live a whole lot less hectic life. Maybe we are lesser evolved we have essentially complicated the process of food, shelter, and companionship beyond what they are. Needs. The apes seem to have it much better... Minus the people killing them for money or destroying their homes for money. I can only assume that they do such things in order to feed and shelter their family but I doubt it.

Answer 7

I do not call myself an evolutionist, but I am going to answer this anyway.



Evolution is is a theory to help understand the changes in lifeforms over time. It does not have anything to do with the original creation or manifestation of these lifeforms. Evolution does not mean a belief in random events or chaos.



Most people who accept this theory would tell you that humans did not come from apes, but rather humans and many apes seem to have a common ancestor (different branches of the same family tree).



Much of that difference in DNA between humans and apes is the genetic coding for the brain and how the brain is used. Just because humans have languages and logical thought patterns which can be taught from generation to generation does not mean that basically humans are not animals. To believe this might be considered the height of arrogance.



If you look carefully at human behavior in a mob or group expecting an immediate danger (large predator or fire, for example) you might find much less difference between your behavior and that of many of the great apes.



The simplest cases of change in a lifeforms over time deal with microbes. Humans know through study that some species have changed enough to now be considered a different species. This is more than just changes in antibiotic response or nutritional needs. These changes are associated with changes in DNA coding.



Please understand that some people are so set in their own dogma that they cannot begin to change their belief system no matter what evidence is presented to them. They have no method to begin to understand how a flu virus can change from year to year. Evolution does not have all the answers, especially if one is interested in the original creation of life. Evolution can, on the other-hand, help understand how life can change.

Answer 8

Apes are not humans. Humans are not apes. Evolution doesn't work that way. If humans had evolved from apes, there would be no more apes. Chimps are our closest relatives due to similarities in DNA yes, but our evolutionary paths separated many years ago.

Answer 9

You religious people are dumbasses and always piss me off. Learn a little bit more about science before making a complete *** of yourself. I know science is a little bit more difficult to swallow compared to your religion where magic always happens in Lala land. The theory of evolution doesn't say that we came from monkeys. I know that's what your preacher or whatever you have over there teaches you kids. But that isn't the case. Open your mind, don't be a mindless drone that drinks whatever your religion tells you. Wake up and learn.

Answer 10

Apes are not humans. They are totally different and are animals in jungles where they belong in their natural habitat.

Answer 11

If you would go naked for about a year, then you would have fur. Our clothes keep the hair worn down. I evolved from God myself. Ha! One day I will evolve back to God. Being reincarnated into a new body, prepared for me by Christ Jesus. Just using a little play on words.

Answer 12

Several, in fact.

Answer 13

Evolution takes too much faith for me to believe!

Answer 14

What usually happens when there is a post such as yours, is that you will get a bunch of mis-information and a tremendous amount of sarcasm, especially from those that call themselves open minded evolutionists. They alway rant at how the Creationist is an idiot. But ranting proves nothing. In response to their ranting I ask them to use that same "Logic" to rant at leading evolutionists that show that the evolutionary hypothesis is much less certain than your answerers believe.



What do they say when the person that is considered to be the most famous atheist/evolutionist of the last fifty years says that he now believes that there is a God. Is he now an idiot? I think not.



Below are quotes from leading Evolutionists.



In addition there is a lengthy article about Anthony Flew



Also there is an article about human fossils in the same strata as dinosaurs. What are evolutionists not telling us?



All of the Quotes below are from leading evolutionists



STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377, 26 10/95, p.682



Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, "Our modern phyla represent designs of great distinctness, yet our diverse world contains nothing in between sponges, corals, insects, snails, sea urchins, and fishes (to choose standard representatives of the most prominent phyla).", Natural History, p.15, Oct. 1990



Steven J. Gould, Harvard, "The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.", Nat.His., V.86, p.13



STEPHEN J. Gould, Harvard , "Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it." Lecture at Hobart & William Smith College, 14/2/1980.



S.J.Gould, Harvard, "We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. ...I regard the failure to find a clear 'vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. ...we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it." Natural History, 2/82, p.2



Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230



COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History, "You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type or organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another.... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. .... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual." HARPER'S, Feb.1984, p.56



Colin Patterson, B.M.N.H. "Well, it seems to me that they (evolutionists) have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support they would value so they searched around to find another model and found one. ...When you haven't got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack of evidence." Darwin's Enigma, p.100



Mark Ridley, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." New Scientist, June, 1981, p.831



H.S. Ladd, UCLA, "Most paleontologists today give little thought to fossiliferous rocks older than the Cambrian, thus ignoring the most important missing link of all. Indeed the missing Pre-Cambrian record cannot properly be described as a link for it is in reality, about nine-tenths of the chain of life: the first nine-tenths.", Geo. So. of Am. Mem. 1967, Vol.II





Now let me show you what one of the world's leading atheists/evolutionists declared.



Former Atheist Says God Exists

By: Cliff Kinkaid (Editor of the AIM Report)

Insight On The News

December 21, 2004

Dallas Morning News



It didn't make news, on the front or back pages of leading American newspapers, but Professor Antony Flew, a prominent British philosopher who is considered the world's best-known atheist, has cited advancements in science as proof of the existence of God. This is comparable to Hugh Hefner announcing that he is becoming a celibate.



At a symposium sponsored by the Institute for Metascientific Research, Flew said he has come to believe in God based on developments in DNA research. Flew, author of the book, Darwinian Evolution, declared, "What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together. The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence."



Associated Press distributed a December 9 story by religion writer Richard N. Ostling about Flew's conversion. Flew told AP that his current ideas had some similarity with those of U.S. "intelligent design" theorists, who believe the complexity of life points to an intelligent source of life, rather than the random and natural processes posited by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.



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Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the most famous atheist in the academic world over the last half-century, Professor Antony Flew of England's University of Reading, now accepts the existence of God.



Mr. Flew's best-known plaint for atheism, "Theology and Falsification," was delivered in 1950 to the Socratic Club, chaired by none other than C.S. Lewis. This paper went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last five decades and set the agenda for modern atheism.



Now, in a remarkable reversal, Mr. Flew holds that the universe was brought into being by an infinite intelligence.



"What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together," he said. "The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence."



Given the conventional wisdom of some psychologists that people rarely, if ever, change their worldview after the age of 30, this radical new position adopted by an 81-year-old thinker may seem startling.



But Mr. Flew's change was consistent with his career-long principle of following the evidence where it led him. And his newfound theism is the product neither of a Damascus road experience nor of fresh philosophical arguments, but by his sustained analysis of scientific data.



Mr. Flew's conclusion is consistent with the actual beliefs of most modern scientific pioneers, from Albert Einstein to quantum physicists like Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. In their view, the intelligence of the universe - its laws - points to an intelligence that has no limitation - "a superior mind," as Einstein put it.



Not a few of our men and women of letters, it would seem, have been looking for God in all the wrong places. Those who dismiss God as a product of psychological conditioning or pre-scientific myth-making have not come to terms with the essential assumptions underlying the scientific enterprise.



Science assumes that the universe follows laws, which leads to the question of how the laws of nature came into being. How does the electron know what to do? In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking asks what breathes fire into the equations of science and gives a universe for them to describe. The answer to the question of why the universe exists, he concluded, would reveal to us "the mind of God."



Last May, I helped organize a New York University symposium on religion and science, with the participation of Mr. Flew and others. Our starting point was science's new knowledge that the universe's history is a story of quantum leaps of intelligence, the sudden yet systematic appearance of intrinsically intelligent systems arranged in an ascending order.



Many people assume that the intelligence in the universe somehow evolved out of nonintelligence, given chance and enough time, and in the case of living beings, through natural selection and random mutation. But even in the most hardheadedly materialistic scenario, intelligence and intelligent systems come fully formed from day one.



Matter came with all its ingenious, mathematically precise laws from the time it first appeared. Life came fully formed with the incredibly intelligent symbol processing of DNA, the astonishing phenomenon of protein-folding and the marvel of replication from its very first appearance. Language, the incarnation of conceptual thought with its inexplicable structure of syntax, symbols and semantics, appeared out of the blue, again with its essential infrastructure as is from day one.



The evidence we have shows unmistakably that there was no progressive, gradual evolution of nonintelligence into intelligence in any of the fundamental categories of energy, life or mind. Each one of the three had intrinsically intelligent structures from the time each first appeared. Each, it would seem, proceeds from an infinitely intelligent mind in a precise sequence.



We can, if we want, declare that there is no reason why there are reasonable laws, no explanation for the fact there are explanations, no logic underlying logical processes. But this is manifestly not the conclusion adopted by Einstein, Heisenberg and, most recently, Antony Flew.



Roy Abraham Varghese of Garland is the author of The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God (Tyr Publishing). He helped organize presentations by Antony Flew in Dallas on two occasions. Readers may contact Mr. Varghese through tyrpublishing.com.



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In closing let me ask,

1) How do you know how old a rock is?

Answer: By the fossils it contains.

2) How do you know how old a fossil is?

Answer: by the rock it comes from.

3) How do you know how old the rock is

Answer: See #1 above.



Ph.d Geologist Don Patton has found the fossilized remains of 5 men, four women and a child. Some of the bones are articulated. However no evolutionist will verify the find. Many including Richard Dawkins refuse the travel to the site. The reason? These fossils are in the same strata as Dinosaur National Park. If this find were verified, this would put humans conteporary with Dinosaurs. Either Man is 100 million years old, or the dinosaurs lived very recently. Either way the Theory of evolution, as Richard Dawkins confesses, would be utterly shattered.



The find is factual. This means that you do not really need to worry that Man is decended from anything.



In addition near the same location there are human footprints along side of Dinosaur prints. The prints have been verified as genuine. Again Evolutionists will not come to the site. From their oak desks they declare that the prints are frauds.

Source(s):

www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks

Or look up Don Patton on a search engine