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Well I'll Be A Monkey's Uncle
killproc writes "A new report suggests that interbreeding between humans and chimpanzees happened a lot more recently than was previously thought. The report, published in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, estimates that final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago."
Scientists: Humans and Apes share a common ancestor.
:-)
Creationists: No they don't, God created us all as we are now.
Scientists: To clarify, we're actually descended from the interbreeding between our ancestral humans and early chimps, which created a third, infertile "hybrid" species, the human equivalent of a mule. Though incapable of breeding among its own, the hybrid is believed to have survived by mating with its parent human or chimp species.
Scientists: Oh, and our ancestor's were happily getting up to monkey business with their cousins (so to speak) for four million years after the split!
Creationists: Oh right, that clears that up then! Cheers
(Second scientist line ripped off from the rather good article on this subject on the Guardian's website.)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I liked my headline a whole lot better:
Was Your Ancestor a Monkey F**ker?
This guy's the limit!
Britney Spears unavailable for comment
... welcome our new Hupanzee Overloards!
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
before a chimp became attractive enough to mate with.
I mean all that hair and leathery lips! Gotta be some serious drinking before she looks good.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
"from the blame-killproc*-for-the-title dept."
Brilliant, Zonk!
*article submitter
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Why, Steve Ballmer of course ;)
Oh no... it's the future.
I hate every ape I see,
From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z
Oh you'll never make a monkey out of me.
Anyone feel there is a Steve Ballmer joke to be made here?
"The Nature paper joins a wave of work showing that the lines between species are hazy ..."
This is the critical point that creationists who blather on about "macroevolution vs. microevolution" (a distinction without a difference) and "nobody has ever observed a speciation event" (just not true) willfully miss. Species lines are imposed by observers after the fact; they are not inherent in the nature of living organisms.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This is not news.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
According to my wife, it happened just last night...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
I'm sure there are better ones on the `Net, but this one seemed 'good enough'. Gives an idea of the time frame these scientists work with. 5.4 to 6.3 million years ago was ... a long fucking time ago. But in the grand view, not really that big of a deal.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
What this shows is that there was likely interbreeding between the ancestor line of humans and the ancestor line of chimpanzees. Unfortunately, all the headlines I've read skip that distinction and dive right into "humans and chimps interbred." They were not either modern humans or modern champanzees, and were likely much closer in genetics and appearance than we are to modern chimps, even though even now we are very close genetically after 5 million years of divergence.
I think I'll stop here.
A sampling of real headlines courtesy of Google News:
Gr-ape lengths made in human DNA study
Men mated with chimps for 1m years (now that's endurance!)
A chimp off the ol' block
Chimps & Early Man couldn't stop lovin'
Grandma Manimal
And they keep going and going...
This guy's the limit!
What a great way to start off the day with a laugh!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
here
Dubya!
That was weeks ago, and it was on a dare. Let's speak no more of this.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Robin Williams' body hair explained.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yeah, I heard that once you've had Chimp Poontang you just can't get enough...
Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
I know the headline was probably meant as a joke, but before the Creationists go, um, ape on us it should be noted that Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Bonobos, Orangutangs and Man are all "great apes", evolved from earlier species. Apes evolved from Old World Monkeys about 25 million years ago.
Apes are differentiated from monkeys by their larger brain size, versatile shoulder joints, and lack a tail.
"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" Oh sorry you must be my cousin...
And now you know why the Scopes monkey trials. (By the way, it's only 6.3 weeks ago in Kansas.)
StoneCypher is Full of BS
[funky beat of "Rock Me Amadeus" starts playing] Female Nurse Ape: Ooh, help me Dr. Zaius! Apes: [in unison] Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius Oh... Dr. Zaius Ape: Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius. Troy: What's wrong with me? Zaius: I think you're crazy. Troy: Want a second opinion. Zaius: You're also lazy. Apes: [in unison] Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius [one ape starts breakdancing] Oh... Dr. Zaius Ape: Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius.
Indian mythology especially the epic Ramayana says exactly this. Infact one of the major roles in the epic is perfromed by a half man-half monkey species.
estimates that final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago.
Did someone forget to inform Michael Jackson?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Humpanzees, that would be.
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
Mr. President I present this as evidence of your lies!
http://www.bushorchimp.com/images/pic39.jpg
Note to the Anti Trolls: THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A JOKE, NOT ANTI-BUSH.
She was hot, the lights were low, and we were drunk.
...final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago.
They should go to the mall sometime and revise their estimate accordingly.
Oh sure, and I was just starting to get over it. Yeah, we had our ups and downs but doesn't everyone?! I thought we were going to be together forever! Now, my psychiatrist says I'm well on the road to good mental health again and you bring this up! Christ, it was 5.4 MILLION YEARS AGO...why do you have to keep reminding me?!
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
"A new report suggests that interbreeding between humans and chimpanzees happened a lot more recently than was previously thought."
Jane Goodall?
you damn dirty ape!
John Hawks, a professor of anthropology, has a pretty sound and harsh refutation of the article. It looks like, if John is to be followed, that this is some pretty wishful thinking and sloppy work.
He has a follow-up post on his weblog as well.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I thought the last 2 US presidential elections were evidence of much more recent human-chimp interbreeding. Did I miss a meeting or something? Maybe it was orangs...
A-Bomb
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Hell, some people are still screwing animals so I wouldn't be that suprised.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
I have a niece who is very skilled at climbing and swinging from trees!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Please, you unenlightened folks all have it wrong. It's an indisputable fact that the Flying Spaghetti Monster implanted that genetic information in Humans and Chimps just to make it LOOK like we're evolved from a common ancestor. He's so sneaky!
Arrrrrrrr matey...
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
IMHO creationist characatures and jokes are like making fun of windows 3.11.
let it go dude, just let it go. It is possible to have a discussion about science without making fun of creationists. It's also possible to have a discussion of space exploration without making fun of UFO believers.
This report seems nonsensical
Interbreeding occurs rarely in nature, certainly not to the extent that it changes and entire species, as the article claims to be the case with humans.
Also, interbreeding usually occurs between closely related species in the same Genus. This article is claiming interbreeding between two fairly distant species. Humans and chimps are not in the same Genus, Tribe, or Subfamily. You have to go all the way up to the Family level before humans and chimps merge.
Generally, the conclusion seems to be hogwash. But if it is true, it's a profound discovery affecting much more than just our understanding of chimps and humans. It affects our understanding of how distant two species can be and still interbreed. And it suggests that some species would be far, far more prone to this distant interbreeding than anything we see in nature today even amoungst closely related species. It would also suggest that such distant interbreeding can produce viable offspring.
I hate to quibble, but the summary is not quite right. It isn't like there were chimpanzees, humans evolved "up" from chimpanzees, and the chimpanzees remained the same. This isn't how evolution works. What happened was that a single species broke into two separate species. Both species continued to change and evolve. A chimpanzee has done just as much "evolving" as a human has, it just went in a different direction. Whatever the case though, if you were to compare a chimpanzee ancestor to a human and a modern chimp, you would find that you are looking at three very different species.
I am not saying that human evolution isn't teh pwn, but keep in mind that things don't "branch" like in a tree where the original branch remains. When things branch they move off in different directions and the original species before the branch is lost.
... desperate slashdotters
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
...evidence of the Missing Link?
Bush was right!
Now if we could just figureout how to make a human-chimpanzee hybrid with four butts.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
... what was it that I hooked up with after a particularly drunken in college a few years back?
Finally!
5.4 minutes ago :-P
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I can understand the poverty of the imagination that makes normal people see a headline like this and scratch their heads in truly chimp-like fashion. After all, it is hard for many people to contextualize just how much closer together man and chimp once were.
But I don't understand creationists, whose entire religious belief is founded upon an incredibly intricate imaginary world that even they can't agree on, being so shocked. So we have a shared ancestry with monkeys. This is somehow impossible while the parting of the Red Sea, water into wine, the resurrection-- these are not?
Let's not forget that Chimps have been evolving along the way as well - I highly doubt that they were the same 4.5-6.3M years ago as they are now, so *our ancenstors* were doing it with *their ancestors*, not with "chimps" per se.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Yes, I remember it well. Suddenly it was twice as hard to get a date on a Saturday night as before.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
According to paleontology, this happened first in the San Fernando Valley. Paleontologists have excavated and found fossilized devices made of stone and birds eyes-which may have functioned as the equivalent of modern day video cameras.
We'll, I'm curious, since there appears to be relatively recent common ancestry. Do we know if humans can successfully mate with any other primate?
And when I think about you I touch myself.
Evolution is about how many of your spawn live long enough to spawn.
According to this highly reliable souce. Further, don't even think about Googling for "monkey porn". Don't do it! Ya just had to try it didn't ya.
that their published work has upon the conversations that I have to have with my Aunt Tilly.
Artist:Dead Milkmen
...
...
Album: Big Lizard in my Backyard
Chorus to song: Gorilla Girl
But I love my groovy gorilla girl,
and her groovy, gorgeous gape, oh!
Her fabulous zoo-keeper father,
my love looks like an ape!
Nooo!
But ya fook one goat...
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Chimp's gotta get really drunk to sleep with a slashdot luser.
Now all the furries are going to come out and say that what they do is perfectly natural. Damn you, science, damn you.
Choked when I realized maybe Tarzan mated with Cheetah. Obviously we're taking about a common ancestor way before Homo Erectus--the latter dating back 2 million years ago. Still that explains why Chimps and Humans have so much in common, sharing 96% of their DNA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_sapiens
MILF. Monkey I'd like to !#$@#!
So spider man is real ! I knew it.
Many of the /. posts I read.
I'm as old as I-can-be
and have to tell you my-story
a long and fruitful epogee
about my Chim-Pan-family
Chim-Pan A and Chim-Pan B
married underneath a tree
They had some girls who were care-free
And named them Chim-Pan C and E.
Then Chim-Pan F and Chim-Pan E
They had a boy named Chim-Pan D
He Ran off with Chim-Pan C
to raise their own big family.
Chim-Pan G through Chim-Pan P
The bunch, they were a sight to see
They'd run and eat and sleep and pee
The run-amock-kid-family
So every pod and every pea
was gobbled up by A through P
until their wasn't much to see
but tattered leaves and shrubbery.
The food was scarce and G through P
grew old and raised small families
And Chim-Pan Q through Chim-Pan V
spent most their time quite hung-ar-y
They left and found a forest tree
that turned out to be fruit-plenty
Time went by and Chim-Pan V
Gave birth to W through me.
Now you know the whole story
About my great big family
Tell all your friends you heard from me
Sincerely Yours, Chim-Pan-Z
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I'm surprised that nobody got killed trying to release this blasphemous information.
1) Earth older than 6000 years? check
2) Support of evolution? check
3) bestiality OMGWTFBBQ!! check
The fundies must be clawing their own skin off reading this!
do() || do_not();
Gosh, that gets on my every last nerve! Apes are not monkeys and chimps are apes! Now I feel better. Thank you very much!
"The suggestion of interbreeding was met with skepticism by paleontologists, who said they had trouble imagining a successful breeding between early human ancestors, which walked upright, and the chimpanzee ancestors, which walked on all fours."
Hello Cruel World
A couple of old school British colonialists conversing...
"What ever happened to that Smythe fellow?"
"Well, last I heard he was cohabitating with a chimpanzee in Chad."
"A chimpanzee!? Male or female?"
"Female of course, nothing queer about old Smythe."
A guy on vacation goes to the big city as a tourist when he makes the acquaintance of someone named Sal. Sal is a gregarious guy, knows everything about the city, and seems to have done everything it is possible to have done, so tourist guy is happy to have him along as a companion.
During their travels, Sal points to a block of row homes. "See those houses? I was on the construction crew that built those, and maybe half the other houses in this neighborhood. But do they call me "Sal, the home builder?" No."
Later, while crossing a bridge, Sal points to a spot on the river below. "See that? Right there, there was this rowboat with a bunch of kids in it, which capsized. Idiot parents didn't put lifejackets on the kids. So I had to jump in and save the little guys. Seven kids, I pulled out of the water! But do they call me, "Sal, the saver of drowning children?" No."
Later still, they're passing the metropolitan zoo. Sal looks particularly steamed. "Okay. See the primate house over there?"
"I fucked ONE chimp..."
or niece
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
Come over here bobo, and give me some of that sweet monkey lovin'! Afterward, we can fling poo at eachother, and eat ants all night in the moonlight. Ahh yes, romance is in the air, my sweet.
... what did you expect, something profound?
This article is pure bogus garbage. Anyone who's been to Washington D.C., Brussels, Rome, London, or any other world capital will clearly see evidence of human/chimp interbreeding. Curiously, the results of such breeding most commonly resemeble the posterior of an equine. Film at 11.
A Korean professor fakes cloning a human-chimp hybrid and gets another 10 years in jail.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
quote: When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
---
What was he thinking? Of course it stems from evolution.
Art may be the equivalent of stronger muscles for the mind. Artists may make it possible to do completely new and useful activities.
Or easier to understand bee dances- artists may figure out new ways to communicate ideas for the rest of the social group.
Or a peacock's tail- artists may have sex & reproduce more than non-artists.
Or just another way of gathering food. "Rich" members of society give food & resources to artists allowing artists to survive and reproduce. So artists are a successful symbiote or parasite on powerful or rich members of society.
---
Some things like "perfect" pitch or a "four octive range" are rare but basic talents run strong in some families just as talent for football runs strong in others.
---
As soon as a creature has the ability to be happy or unhappy (and even dogs can do this) then you can train them to behave differently without having to give them real food or resources. How is a painting of a rich patron that different from a pat on the head and praise to your dog that fetched the dead pigeon for you (or rolled over and played dead).
Art could start randomly-- a joke or story or picture that stimulates the brain of barely intelligent apes could definately have value (and cost to produce). Once it has value and cost, then it will be selected for or against by natural selection.
A worst case example- if you spend your people's grain to build a big statue of yourself, they may all starve and then you will be killed by them or enemy soldiers.
So art can vary from the little ruffle of yellow on the back of a bird's neck to the gaudy and expensive peacock's tail (and it does-- people somewhere probably died because of the money and resources spent on the orange gateway art project in central park).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The blurb is very misleading. There was no "intercourse between humans and chimps" because THERE WERE NO humans or chimps back then. We did not evolve from chimps, humans and chimps simply had COMMON ancestry, a very long time ago. What this means is that the ancient ancestor of humans was able to, for a period of time, interbreed with the ancient ancestor of chimps. They were NOT that different back then. They may not have even looked very different. However, the genetic code was beginning to diverge because they had formed into two isolated populations, and then came back together briefly, before diverging forever into the lineages we can observe today. This "messy" split theory is still not entirely proven, but is an interesting analysis based on genetic sequence divergance data obtained from hundreds of specimens.
Now when to tell someone to "go fuck a monkey", I know they really can!
That would probably explain why I look like a silverback when my shirt's off. And the calluses on my knuckles? It's cause the drag on the ground when I walk. Damn, I hate being a primate.
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
To all the Creationists out there: If God did not intend for evolution to occur, he would have made a closed source genome. But, since it is open source, anybody can alterations...
Human-Chimp hybrids are alive today! I know this for a fact, in that:
- I have work directly for them (the hybrid being my direct supervisor),
- I have worked for companies that they were members of the executive staff,
- I have even invested in stock, in companies that, as it turns out, they ran,
- I suspect (at least) a few are elected to office in Washington DC, right now!
How else do you explain the human appearance and animal behavior of many supervisors, Corporate Executives and politicians?!!
I always wondered why my three-year-old son has so much back hair.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
... human ancestors bred with chimpanzee ancestors long after they had initially separated into two species
More like lions & tigers than humans & chimps
fucking hyping wankers
lol, no need
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The earliest recorded case of 'beer goggles' recorded 5.4 million years ago.
Caveman 1: Dude, you totally did a chimp last night.
Caveman 2: Oh my God! How much did I drink?
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
From the article: "... that sequences from the X chromosome, one of two chromosomes that determine gender, gave consistently more recent divergence times". Rephrased, the X chromosome is more chimpanzee-like. Remember, in humans, XY is male and XX is female. Any conclusions? (Ducks).
Now instead of yelling "God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!", the creationists will have to yell "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Chim-Chim!"
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
As everyone knows the secondborn were created by Iluvatar and the Valar.
The interbreeding occurded in Angband where Morgoth created the orks and in Isengart where Saruman created the Urugh.
Are all songs forgotten since the Eldar left?
*sigh*
Who hasn't at least seen the ads for porn sites where women have sex with animals?
Who hasn't at least heard about men and farm animals?
So our less civilized ancestors did NOT mess around with chimps, only sheep, cows, and anything else that would let them. makes sense to me...
I think it just happened Monday. Did anyone else see Katie Couric kiss the Yahoo! chimp full on the lips on the Today show? CBS must be thrilled.
In accordance with the State of Kansas, we must offer this alternative to evolution *cue soundtrack to "I dream of Jeannie"*
If you go to Amsterdam, you can see monkeys and humans breeding live right NOW!!
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Why not? The ancestral post seems to be judging evolution as a whole according to standards which are not only very human, but also very specific to current-era sensibilities. It holds aloft our forms of cultural expression - forms of expression which were specifically crafted to appeal to human sensibilities, and asks why evolution does not bless all forms of life with this same style of expression, or at least something close enough that we, who have declared ourselves to be the best and smartest of all the animals, could understand.
I do not speak Antish. I don't know anyone who does. I think it's inappropriate to assume we know everything there is to know about being an ant, certainly not enough to say whether there is any room for creativity in their tiny brains.
As for whether that question is at all relevant to evolution - I think others have answered that question quite well already.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
"You're such a monkey-fucker!"
"Why would you call me a monkey-fucker?"
"Well, let's see. First of all, you fuck monkeys."
"Oh yeah!"
HAHAHAHA
Culture - traditions that are passed down over time. These are taught, and are not done by instinct. There are several bird species, as well as primates and orcas, that have "cultures" distinct from other populations of the same species. Some orca pods have learned (and taught their offspring) how to kill seals by beaching themselves. Other orcas don't do this. Similar things happen with dolphins, tool-using birds, Japanese macaques and other primates, and the list goes on. Umm, no, they don't get fancy headdresses and dance around, but where are you going to draw the line? Arbitrarily? Psychologically, these things are culture.
Art - Bowerbirds. Look them up. Yeah, maybe it's for sexual purposes, but maybe our own art began that way as well. Several birds have taken art to an extreme to the point that sex does not appear to be the main goal.
Language - birds of the same species have different dialects in different regions. Dolphins have sounds that represent names of individuals, each name being a part of the mother's name. It's true that we don't know exactly how animals communicate, but I doubt you would say that "dolphins are different from everything else" and mean this as a point in denying the processes of evolution for that species simply because they use echolocation.
These "people do this and animals don't" never hold up, because the same distinctions can be made with EVERY organism. You are creating arbitrary boundaries.
Wow, reading all the blather about Darwinian evolution is great reading - who needs to buy SciFi novels when I've got /. !!
:-\
Paleez, I bet you guys believe in body thetans as well
The difference between micro and macro evolution would be significant if random mutation and natural selection cannot explain a natural phenomenon. If you cannot add up a bunch of small changes into a larger change within that framework, that would be a major challenge for Darwinism. You would then have a back and forth about a particular phenomenon to attempt to explain how it could be explained.
That is if Darwinistic theories are falsifiable. If not, you would then just get a faith commitment to materialism. "It happened by random mutation because it cannot be other way according to my philosophical presuppositions."
The Intelligent Design concept of irreducible complexity would be how you falsify Darwinism. But that isn't science, so Darwinism must not be either.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Those chimp ladies are so good looking.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
knew about it all along.
Humans have some really unique aspects about us as a species. We have advanced language. We have art. We have complex emotions and psychology.
None of those are unique to humans.
despite the fact that there are TONS more ants on the earth than humans, and the number of generations of ants in all of history, they never evolved to have art or culture.
How exactly do you know that ants don't make artistic scent patterns deep in their tunnels?
You can't take the sky from me...
From the Desk of George W. Bush:
In light of this information, I have proposed a Constitutional Amendment that would stipulate that marriage be defined as the union of a human man and a human woman.
Thank You,
God Bless America
GWB
"This is the critical point that creationists who blather on about "macroevolution vs. microevolution" (a distinction without a difference) and "nobody has ever observed a speciation event" (just not true) willfully miss. Species lines are imposed by observers after the fact; they are not inherent in the nature of living organisms."
Actually, there is a huge distinction between macroevolution and microevolution. Microevolution has, obviously, been observed and validated. What speciation event has been observed or proven? Now the neo-Darwinists are grasping at straws by spewing out a provocative idea that has no basis in truth, but is being formulated from a faulty presupposition. One thing overlooked in these articles is that since Toumai (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) is not human, they must concoct another harebrained hypothesis to explain their faulty evolutionary points of view. This isn't a blow to Creationists, it is a blow to Evolution, because, yet again, they've been proven wrong on a supposed human ancestor though, in fairness, many evolutionists had already had sharp disagreements and debunked the Toumai fossil after the grandiose announcement that a human ancestor had been found. However, the follow-up studies that prove that Toumai wasn't human don't get the fanfare that the initial announcement gets. Such is the neo-Darwinian circus. I'm sure Toumai, even though debunked, will be in text books for the next 100 years as a prime example of a human ancestor any way.
I cannot believe anyone in their right mind believes that drivel.
Shut your f**kin' face monkey f**ker!
"People, people, please remember, when you're having sex with a monkey, you're also having sex with every monkey that monkey has ever had sex with!" -Dick Dietrick, Night Stand.
Yes, I know chimpanzees are not monkeys.
The only thing left here is a huge smoking crater. The poor schmoe has been shown six ways from Sunday how his arguments are based on misunderstanding and if he still doesn't get it, I'd call it willfull ignorance.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
We look so much like monkeys, we must have fucked them at some point. Brilliant science! An epiphany struck over a pint of Guinness no doubt.
Well, the chaos thing doesn't work for a lot of people studying it. Evolution is not random. Mutations are random. The processes of evolution require that some mutations are more beneficial than others, and adaptation occurs when a population alters to the point of becoming better adapted to its environment. This may be morphologically or behaviorally. Evolution has a lot of genetic components (it wouldn't happen at all without genetic variation), but the environment is what the population has to adapt to. Remember, evolution acts on the level of species or populations, not at the level of genome, and it is anything but random.
The actions of some of our beloved politicians in recent years are make more sense given this discovery.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
It just goes to show our ancestors would screw just about anything.
So it really was planet of the apes back then.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Of course humans and chimpanzees of interbred recently... Darl McBride is living proof! And I'm a little suspicious about this guy too!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
Most of those traits that your are referring to, are typically sexually selected traits. There are a plethora of examples in the animal world were traits are developed that have nothing to do with survival but everything to do with procreation.
Look at the male peacocks tail. Male peacocks - and many other bird species too - have spectacular 'tails' that are extravagantly developed. The peacock tail is a disadvantage to survival and there a specific "costs" in maintaining such an extravagant train.
All sexually reproducing species have traits that are sexually selected and result in bizarre displays such as large antlers, bright colors, hairless bodies or even musical ability.
Note: your two points on how evolution works from which your reasoning springs is flawed and incomplete. I find Dawkins gene's centric viewpoint revolutionary and provides a much deeper level of understanding to how and why natural selection works.
I'll ask you a question again, why don't humans have wings?
Exactly. When the primordial thrust behind evolution, survival, suggests we should have. I think Ender raises a clever yet subtle tenet of that model which seems lost on most here, even you.
Reread his posts carefully and cast all your inclinations and bias aside for just a bit. Quiet your mind and a tempest of creativity will soon follow.
I don't think I've seen such fervor and angst wielded against one man (Ender) for honest intellectual pursuits since the likes of Salem. He must be a witch! Burn him! Burn him!
I refer you to the excellent Evolution 101 podcast, transcripts of which can be found here. Select the transcripts that focus on molecular evidence. The molecular evidence is overwhelming that we have a common ancestor with chimps, and creatonist theory (if you can call it that) is falsified.
This isn't to say that nothing is unique about humans. Clearly we were somehow positioned to undergo rapid selection for certain traits that the chimp ancestor population didn't need. Reconstructing how that happened is reasearch program that will take generations, but gaps in knowledge about past events doesn't discredit the knowledge we do have, however much you may wish it otherwise.
That all life on Earth in its amazing diversity has a common ancestry in the inconceivable distant past is to me a much more awe inspiring thought than any myth of special creation. Scientists and other thoughtful people don't just reject creationism because it's demonstrably wrong - they also reject it because it's ugly.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Wow, that is funny!
"Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."
Which means, as near as i can figure, the 404-not found page was NOT FOUND! (404)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Shouldn't it be 'Well a monkey'll be my uncle'?
I'm a Book
On the Bookshelf
To put this into perspective: all they did is a diff the two genomes and attempt to extrapolate modification dates based on similarity and difference. Unfortunately, DNA doesn't come with a timestamp, and it doesn't have comments like
If you want to tell me the DNA sequences are very similar, that's fine. If you want to say that it probably implies they're probably forked from the same source tree, that's fine too. And it's also fine if you want to say something like: "based on our current understanding of the DNA grammar, it appears that these lines in chimp_dna/fling_feces.c were merged back from a similar routine in human_dna/throw_rocks.c; therefore, we assume that there was some monkey business going on between the two species."
But please do not try to sensationalize this by guessing when or how often the forks and merges occured. That's just bad science.
I feel stupidder fur havening reed dat ardicull.
It's safe to call apes monkeys as long as you're not referring to orangutan librarians.
So, is it the Windows users that have monkeys for ancestors or is it the Linux users that have monkeys for ancestors?
Theo daRat
"A new report suggests that interbreeding between humans and chimpanzees happened a lot more recently than was previously thought"
did we all forget about Micheal jackson and bobo?
that was only about 10 years ago...
...to the term "hot monkey love".
Show me proof for God and I'll start working on finding one for positive mutation.
I somehow doubt I'll have the harder job here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do you think the divorace was a messy one?
I saw some commentary on this topic claiming it was "unthinkable" that a human ancestor would mate with a chimp. Now, as near as I can tell, some of the issues of, erm, cross-species intercourse are continuing to this day. It's frowned upon, sure. But social norms be damned it's still happening. It's just that the intercourse actually led to reproduction. That's the sticky bit. Um. Pun not intended.
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
I mean, after all, we now have proof it is for propagation...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Art's value in an early society would be the capacity to express, prior to any scientific method or reasoned understanding of that capacity, ideas that could not be framed using early simple language alone. The later discovery that certain art is pleasing to our visual or auditory senses is not the advantage, but a refinement on the advantage I get from the very practical ability to discuss something in detail without actually standing next to it.
You and I are in a small tribe. I need to describe to you how to stalk a mammoth, and I can't explain it while we're actually dodging the mammoth's tusks. Everything in my life and your life we've learned by watching other people do and by our own painful trial and error, so either you come along on the hunt but can't participate the first time, or I have to coach you in advance. We need every hand we can get to have a chance of bringing these monsters down, so I will coach you, but I don't have military tactical theory, survey maps, anatomy books, video recordings of other hunts, watches, geometry, more than two dozen words, or even a hard count of how many spears it will take to kill a mammoth.
I make a mark on a stone to be the mammoth, and I draw marks to be you, and I indicate with my hands how you are to move and when it is best to throw your spear. I do this in plain sight of the tribe, so even children too young to come on the hunt can see how it is done. Not everyone will understand right away, but I will do it before every hunt, again and again. I'm not good at describing it and you're not smart enough to get even 25% of what I'm saying. However, if this gives us even a slightly improved chance of being successful, or more likely reduces the number of our fellow tribesmen I lose to the mammoth by even one, then our tribe has a huge advantage in those situations where the extra tribesmen becomes useful in a communal tribe: all labor is divided by the total number of hands. That one preserved tribesman becomes one less woman I have to send out to hunt, which is one more who will likely live long enough to breed one more child, and in the tough times, the extra people are the difference between our small tribe breeding and inbreeding. My simple, practical 'art' has given us a non-inherited but biologically meaningful advantage.
If our early social nature was expressed in no other way than 'human see, human do' then being able to see a representation of a thing as the thing itself for the purpose of discussion is both an emergent property of our neurological biology and the most significant adaptation in our cultural history, as we can have no continuous culture without it.
I'm going to turn the tables on you a bit with a later cultural adaptation. Between the above and what's next you can infer which parts of our heritage are biological and which are social, sometimes you can make these inferences in a testable way, but I'll leave it to you to learn the science.
Our tribe is fat and happy, but there's other tribes near our territory and resources won't hold out forever. Thanks to my aggressive nature, I stay in charge of the tribe by being pretty much the most dangerous, and I have my brother and a few cousins to back me up. Now when I go to raid the next tribe over to take their women, I normally have to leave my brother or two of my cousins behind to keep the women I took last week from running off. I need more spears against the enemy, but I don't want to risk losing women.
So I tell a lie about the other tribe I was in before this one. I draw the angry face of a mammoth, and say how a few women ran off when the men were gone, and an angry mammoth stomped all over the children who had been left behind. My lie is ridiculous, but since 75% of my tribe is functionally retarded by modern standards, and the picture's pretty angry looking, now I only have to leave one cousin behind instead of two. We can fight better, and will be more successful taking women (or whatever else we want). More valuable is that the extra spears and our
-jpowers
Placing a value judgement of "Negative", "Neutral" or "Positive" on a mutation is an error. The mutations just "are", and the resulting creature has either shifted to being more optimized for a slightly diferent niche in the environment, and less optimized for the niche the parents exist in, or it has remained optimized for the niche of it's parents.
...ook!
That they can't inter-breed.
Mind the frickin' laser...
The 5.4 million years ago figure is definitely inaccurate... make it 5.4 minutes.
...
*smokes a cigarette*
WHEW!!! I thought they were going to say it was so recent at to conjure thoughts of "Yessturrday... there was a breeding that was meannnt ttoooo beee... SUDDenly, I'm not half the man I yooossuu toobee..."
Phew... Don't have any more hair today than I did yesterday...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Speciation is indeed a hazy concept. Important polymorphisms in the human genome predate the split between humans and chimps (for instance the MHC class II genes). This implies that at these particular loci, a contemporary human may be more closely related to the chimp in the zoo than to the fellow next door.
This is an arty but parodic take on the question of "what would it take to convince someone to choose a chimp?" Answer: one alienated Parisian woman in a bad marriage, one male chimp, and last but not least, an avant-gardish Japanese filmmaker (Oshima). Yes, it's the same guy who made "In the realm of the senses".
"A new report suggests that interbreeding between humans and chimpanzees happened a lot more recently than was previously thought." It only happened once; I was real drunk and needed the money.
The suggestion of interbreeding was met with skepticism by paleontologists, who said they had trouble imagining a successful breeding between early human ancestors, which walked upright, and the chimpanzee ancestors, which walked on all fours.
If they're lucky they'll stay that way and nobody will tell them about usenet alt.binaries.
humans are finite beings, and therefore we must be limited. yet, we have the tendency to unscrew the unscrewable. and now this? what a disturbing trend indeed. why does everything "have to have" a scientific explanation to it, and anything that stands in the way (like the Bible, because it very exclusive in the subject of "creation) is always consider useless-with-no merit, a myth or some pigment of one's imagination? :/
Controversy? I think not: http://www.bushorchimp.com/images/pic36.jpg/
Let me share with you all something I've personally witnessed about evolution. I think it dove-tails your thread fairly well.
When I was younger living in Kingwood, TX in 1985 (still considered to be a new development at the time), I remember seeing many dead gray squirrels on the road. It didn't really seem to matter what roads, as the road kill was evenly distributed throughout the city. Over the years, I've seen exactly how they would die. These squirrels would run across the road in front of traffic. But that's not what killed them. What kills them is that they freak out and run back the other way, then back again, and again. Basically, they just run out to the road and can't make up their mind by running back and fourth till...POP...they see the underside of a tire.
Fast forward to today where the population of Kingwood, TX has at least tripled. Though more construction has taken place displacing vast areas of forests, you can still see gray squirrels all over the place. In fact, I can visually see MORE of them today then I did back in 1985. Even more astonishing, I don't see ANY dead squirrels. Maybe I will find a dead cat, or possum in rare instances, but no dead squirrels. How can this be? How can the grey squirrel population increase and yet their dead on the road decrease?!
I found the answer. When those bastards run across the road, they don't freak out anymore. They run in one direction and never look back. They keep going, and fast!
They've gotten smarter, they're adapting, surviving...evolving.
Life is not for the lazy.
"Well I'll be a monkey's uncle!" takes on a whole new meaning.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Two different populations breed in isolation. Group A develops some mutations that are beneificial in their environment, Group B develops mutations benificial in theirs. Now, through whatever mechanism (fire, flood, you name it) Groups A and B are brought back together and interbreed. Now you get permutations of the mutations in group A, and the mutations in group B.
This is an effect I noticed when I played with a "genetic hillclimber" optimization engine a few years back -- just to watch how it worked, I wrote a scoring function that basically scored a string of bits to see how close it was to the string "this is a test". Watching the population as it ran, you got some bit-vectors that guessed the "this" part at the front, and some that guessed the "test" part at the end, and both had middling-fair scores. But the minute those two bit-vectors were paired together, their offspring took over the whole population, with strings with "this...test", that very quickly converged on the "this is a test" string.
That is to say, different mutations are going on in parallel, and pairs of individuals are interbreeding, and the offspring can have both sets of mutations (or in 2 generations, all four, etc.) When populations split, and join up again later, you can get truly exceptional combinations, as you combine things that let you survive well in two different locales.
This is why I, personally, think the "melting pot" countries of the world are a Good Thing.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Oh my god, I was wrong
it was earth all along
You finally made a monkey
we finally made a monkey
Yes you finally made a monkey out of ME
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
try this one:
The man/chimp love-child?
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
You're STILL interbreeding with humans...
Just look at Bush.
Okay, rate THIS as Troll, morons! Then go back to eating your bananas...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Good luck with that.
There you effete intellectual elitists go again, pushing this talking point that just because you know more about a subject means you are more qualified to comment on it.
Tell me, Mr. "expressojim". Other than your knowledge and expertise, what makes you think you really know any more about primate genetics than anyone else here?
So now we finally know where President Bush comes from.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I have no problem imagining how this would work - paleontologists must have very boring sex lives.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
One of our most prominent, uh, human being (cough) is suspected to be an offspring of such a hybrid?
http://www.bushorchimp.com/
Given what I know (and wish I didn't) about human nature, and by the behavior of some people I've encountered on the internet, I'd wager the chimp/human interbreeding has been going on a LOT more recently than that. (Just look at our president!)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Off the top of my head so this is total groundless speculation, but it shows how "useless" things may have a use.
Humans great 'skill' is their intelligence. So how do you display your intelligence to a mate or peers, so they you earn prestige (which we hope translates to mating success). Why you gather interesting bits of clever stuff to demonstrate. You could work it out yourself, but that is very hard. So what you do is give some prestige to those who have some skills in these things so you can borrow their ideas. So someone who is good at art is well regarded because they can make you interesting items or give you interesting ideas. Personally, I also think art has deeper value ... I suspect it is a concise way for the mind to represent something about the known world that is easily understood and remembered. Anyway when you get these bits of ideas and items you then are consdered quite cool. Just look around at modern society and tell me this isn't going on right now. Today we give it various names: fashion, being cultured etc. Thing is we do value it and therefore we value people who do it.
Bitter and proud of it.
It's Theory not Fact.
Who knows, someday it may be possible to take your average dumb ass screwup and be eable to "inject" some sense into them (nanotech robots) that stop the survival instinct genes from producing and excess of kids and rev up the gene that may control better, more constructive behaviour...?
Of course, just the opposit could happen where religious/political fanatics give everybody extra copies of the "god" gene, or else people who think like the current bush administration, mandate that everybody have build in NSA type nanorecording devices and if you should think or get exposed to "bad thoughts and concepts (like evolution/athiesism, democrat party or something French)", corrective measures (say a free gulag vacation in cuba?), or corrective nanoprograms would be enabled/downloaded to re-wire the brain in real time to elimitate such undesirable stuff.
All I know is this thread makes me want to say "Get your hands of me your damn dirty ape!"
Cholesterol is either LDL or HDL, so I believe the parent is referring to the Milano mutation [apoA-I(Milano) for the science geeks] that renders the person resistant to HDL deficiencies. Pick your poison for more reading:
Press release
PubMed
Article itself (If you are at a place that would have a site license for Biochemistry)
From the article:
"...the line of Toumai creatures then went extinct"
wrong!
The line of the Toumai then split into two groups - 'Pirates' and 'Ninjas'!
Unexpect the expected!
That link just has slashdot protection apparently. In the address bar, just hit enter again. The link will work.
zeno's paradoxes are the work of the devil!
Your specific arguments asking why ants hadn't developed intelligence, speech, etc, is a rediculous. You might as well ask why humans haven't evolved blowholes and the ability to hold our breaths for hours. Ants are already perfectly well adapted to their environment, and in most respects have been vastly more successful than humans. Natural language would add nothing to a species that already communicates so effectively.
>Something is very unique about humans and the evolution model
>does not seem to explain us very well.
Really, your arguments could be simplified without losing anything substantive to saying that you object that humans could have come about by the same means that other animals, which seem to lack intelligence, language, art, and other things we tend to associate with human *dignity*.
You say that evolution doesn't seem to provide a model for the development of say art. This isn't true. What is true is that art isn't a direct adaptation to the external environment. To say that this makes art supernatural or magical, means not that you don't understand evolution, but that you don't understand art.
Not everything we do is to promote our own survival (some people believe this, but they are silly). Evolution provided us with a framework, a mind, a body, but it does not set our goals. You are right to say that we have goals that other animals do not. Humans are not particularly rational agents compared to other animals in the sense that we do not as often pick the correct action to achieve our goals. However, we have more sophisticated goals.
Ants are essentially reflexive agents, and can determine the correct action from their inputs (they don't need to check memory, or apply any learned behavior whatsoever). This doesn't work for all animals though. Mammals generally must be capable of some amount of learning. Animals that must learn their behavior generally cannot respond in a rational manner to situations which have no annalogue in their personal memory. Animals with genetically ingrained reflexes essentially have the experiences of the entire species at their disposal (figuratively, not literally. they of course can't remember specific events in their species past, but their reflexes are shapped to be a proper response to them).
Why have learned behavior at all then, when the learning experience is likely as not to kill you? The answer is that much behavior is too sophisticated to be encoded in any other way. Behavior in response to "I am hungry" is pretty simple, but rational behavior in response to "my herd is being stalked by a predator" cannot really be encoded in reflex. If that behavior were encoded purely in reflexive actions, a rational predator could predict reflexive actions, and manipulate the prey into a situation where the reflexive actions would no longer be rational behavior.
In fact, there are some reasons to think that predator prey relationships are the driving factors in the evolution of human intelligence. If you think about it, a competitive multi agent game is the sort where a more and more sophisticated intelligence pays off. There's some dispute as to whether humans where on the predator or prey end of things when we were developing our intelligence, but the results seem to be the same.
Anyway, once you have something like powerful general intelligence and sympathy (the basic faculty to understand and predict the motives and actions of other agents), it sure seems like general questions about art go away. Art may very well be of no particular benefit to our survival, but merely a side effect of our intelligence, which certainly is necessary to our survival in a competitive environment.
The same could be said of human dignity in general. The degree that we are "put above" other animals. We are obviously not superior to other animals in our ability to be happy or content, certainly animals can be and often do have better lots in life then humans in terms of physical pleasure, contentment, and most of the other
The famous Monkey Song proves this article wrong! ;)
"I'm not kin to the monkey, no no no..."
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Finally, the missing link:
j pg
http://toxyn.org/~m0xx/images/planet-of-the-apes.
Now we know how our pres...ole bushey, came to be among us!
If this is true, my understanding of the origin of AIDS is seriously flawed
Piltdown man a tooth of a pig drawn into an apeman! a lie and a fake 5 years by 1927. Nebraska man a lie and a fake for 40 years by then everyone in the world thought they were from apes. how did it take 40 years for the scientific community to find it was a clumsy fake? Javaman (homo erectus) discovered by Dr Dubois and he himself declared in 1938 that it was just a monkey (gibbon) he had found human skulls in the same stratum did not tell anyone for 30 years! a lie and he eventually renounced the javaman as a fraud himself Peking man Dr. black discovered it a tooth and some ashes soon after human remains were found mixed with animal remains. the animal remains were the food of the humans. hey but they wanted an apeman! so they grabbed bits of both and made Peking Man! 1972 Richard Leaky found a skull that supposedly blew evolution out of the water by 2.5 million years. the only thing left was ramapithecus. just some fragments of jaw bones and some teeth. the same size and shape as a babboon in ethiopia. It never has been found and it never will be found a creature that is more than brute and less than human. Also there is such little evidence for apemen that the amount would not be accepted in any other field of science. And there's plenty more evidence for the non-existenance of evolution! (I know this is not what you like to hear, so just score me nothing as usual. Thanks)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There certainly are a lot of similarities in some individuals:
p hp?pic=269
http://www.randomfunnypictures.com/pictureviewer.
Table-ized A.I.
Genetic algorithms are proof that mutations are a source of new information and variation. There is experimental proof from computer simulation now that Darwinian Evolution does work:
i fe/epgp.html
The following is an excellent article about unguided simulated evolution (URL at end of paragraph). Reproducing programs in a virtual machine that can mutate randomly result in evolution without the need for imposed "fitness criteria" or any ideal "goal solution". The programs either reproduce or crash (die) on their own without any human designed selection process or selection of any particular trait. The system automatically, implicitly selects for "fitness" (the ability to successfully reproduce and/or survive). "Survivor survives"; perhaps a tautology, and very very true.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/meta/getal
Another page on Tierra:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/origins/tierra.htm
A quote from the above page on complexity increase through evolution:
"The unrolled loop is an example of the ability of evolution to produce an
increase in complexity, gradually over a long period of time. The interesting
thing about the loop unrolling optimization technique is that it requires more
complex code. The resulting creature has a genome size of 36, compared to its
ancestor of size 80, yet it has packed a much more complex algorithm into less
than half the space."
Yes.. theyre called republicans
Just a note on what kind of art dolphins make, but first, a short personal attack. People seem to be being polite to you. I'm not sure why. Either your mind is closed or you're just not very bright. I tend towards thinking it's closed mindedness. You offend me. I think it's largely because you insist on carrying on a discussion and ignoring the people you're talking to. It's as if you only read the first sentence of every paragraph or every third word of every sentence. For example, you keep going on about dolphin art. I don't think anyone even mentioned dolphin art. They mentioned dolphin culture and dolphin language but no-one was claiming that any dolphins were holding gallery shows. One thing that was specifically mentioned was artistic displays by birds, but you just ignored that and went on to try building straw men to knock down. I look at your conversations with others and by and large, I don't see them showing you the same level of disrespect that you show. Most people discussing with you are obviously taking care to read and understand what you are saying. They may disagree, but they're listening to you. I don't see you putting the same effort into understanding other peoples points.
So, personal attack, over, now onto the dolphin art. Obviusly Dolphins don't use paintbrushes gripped in their mouths on canvases. They can probably be taught to quite easily, of course. The results would probably just be a mess though. Dolphins haven't evolved like humans in such a way that they can easily manipulate tools and they certainly can't craft them (they have been found using objects as tools in the wild, however). Dolphins are evolved to swim well. They can outdo a human easily in the water, and they have an innate understanding of hydrodynamics that humans can't match. They don't just manipulate their bodies in the water, they understand how the water is moving and flowing around them and they understand about vortices and creating persistant patterns out of moving water. That brings me to the actual art: bubbles. Now, I'm sure _you_ can't see how that can be considered art. And it's obviously not the kind of art you'd hang up in a museum. It's active, constantly changing and ephemeral, but it's still bloody impressive. I'm not talking about blowing streams of little round bubbles, I'm talking about long spiralling, looping, complex unbroken ropes of air, woven underwater. But, yes, I suppose you can't classify it as art in the same sense that sculpture or a painting is art. It mght be better classified as performance art, or you could even just call it play if you wanted. But the point of it is pretty clearly not just simple animal behaviour. The goal is to have fun, to satisfy a creative urge, to impress, to compete. Many of the same reasons that humans create art.
Now, since you seem to have missed this: No-one is really saying that the culture, language, or technology of any group of animals is more sophisticated that that of human beings. It's quite apparant we're the only animals on this planet building machines that travel into space and assembling electronic components with billions of transistors, etc. But even the creationists have to admit that, after we got our modern big brains, whether they evolved or were just granted that way to the first two humans (or three, or four, or however many were created directly by god as opposed to being offspring of other humans in your particular version of the story. I could never figure out if god was creating new women from scratch left and right for all these sons to marry or if the whole first millenium or so was just really, really incestuous. I mean, these people had lifespans in the hundreds of years, but still had normal birth and fertility cycles, right? So we're talking brothers and sisters and aunts and nephews and great-great-great whatevers and their younger relatives all being pretty at pretty much the same stage of life and not having anyone else to marry.), we spent a long time working at the whacking th
I feel it is the duty of one of the readers of Slashdot to test the outcome of this project. Unfortunately, I believe I'm allergic to Chimp fur, so I can't volunteer for this. We should put together a fund to finance the purchase of two laboratory chimps, one of each gender, then attempt to inseminate a human female with the chimp male's ejections. At the same time, try the reverse (use logic here, you frigging Slashdotters I know will respond with a silly remark like how can a human female inseminate a chimp male).
So, for the sake of science, step up Slashdot readers, we'll all chip in for your chimp. We'd love to see the offspring.
BTW... there are special web sites spread across the Internet that would pay well for the video of the insemination itself, I learned this sadly while googling for "horse riding school" for my niece. I was more than a little embarressed trying to explain to a 12 year old girl that certain searches may return undesirable results.
Re:secret name of the honeymonkeys (Score:5, Funny)
= 12572341
by Anonymous Coward
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150000&cid
I lag
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
(Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species," 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.170)
I'm detecting a few problems in your thinking. You are confusing evidence for a particular theory and my argument, which was that irreducible complexity would be how you would falsify the theory. It may be that there are no irreducibly complex biological systems.
Secondly, theoretically I only have to find one irreducibly complex system.
Finally, natural selection alone does not give you the neo-Darwinist mechanism which includes random mutation. How would I falsify that mechanism beyond the means Darwin and the ID people specify? The mechanims Darwin suggested and I suggest isn't science.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Well, if I look at some of the comments here...
Humans don't evolve anymore because of random mutations. The reason is that there is no more natural selection to select the positive parts of the random mutations. The outcome is that the human range gene "error" will increase over time.
Not all is bad though. Natural selection is replaced with generic engineering which is MUCH faster. In the (near?) future, we may be able to propagate positive mutations through human population in a pill form or injections.
>The suggestion of interbreeding was met with skepticism by
>paleontologists, who said they had trouble imagining a successful
>breeding between early human ancestors, which walked upright, and
>the chimpanzee ancestors, which walked on all fours.
Do these scientists not have access to the Internet? I've got some very explicit videos that outline the mechanics of human-animal mating...
Bruce