Well I'll Be A Monkey's Uncle 648
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."
more alt headlines (Score:3, Interesting)
Gr-ape lengths made in human DNA study [canoe.ca]
Men mated with chimps for 1m years [telegraph.co.uk] (now that's endurance!)
A chimp off the ol' block [torontosun.com]
Chimps & Early Man couldn't stop lovin' [sploid.com]
Grandma Manimal [corante.com]
And they keep going and going...
Indian epics and mythology speak about this (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:1, Interesting)
The long and short is this. Evolution occurs through one of two means. It is either a means of survival where the parent species is forced to adapt or die. Or evolution occurs through random mutations being passed on.
If you look at the traits that are unique to humans, you're hard pressed to make the arguement of how and when these traits developed via evolution, and didn't develop in other primates.
And my next point again is lengthy debate, but I one I still make. Humans have some really unique aspects about us as a species. We have advanced language. We have art. We have complex emotions and psychology.
Take a look at ants. Ants have lived exponentially longer on this planet than us. Their lifespan is shorter, and in the same period of time, they have more generations than us. And they outnumber us.
Ants have complex societies and even war with each other. Yet, 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.
We believe that with humans that there is a hierarchy of needs. When basic survival instincts are met, we move on to higher pursuits. Ants have few predators, and yet they can eat most anything, including large animals. I've seen footage of a colony of ants taking down a lion. In many cases, basic survival is taken care of for ants.
So, they have had exponentially more generations than us, and survival wasn't an issue. 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.
He had no answer where they came from and he doesn't buy into creationism, but now we have this unanswered question. Something is very unique about humans and the evolution model does not seem to explain us very well.
Re:Key line from TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to be too disgusting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Key line from TFA (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, is species-hood transitive?
PS : I don't know the answer, but if the "evolution is a continuum" argument is correct, it seems that you should.
Me Tarzan, You Cheetah. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not to be too disgusting, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent.
My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of human-ape hybrids from Soviet Russia? [wikipedia.org]
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think your basic point can also be bolstered through the observation of many other species, who have developed certain behaviors that are for the most part inexplicable, except as a side-effect of the specialization of a part of their physiology.
Dolphins, dogs, cats, and even birds (macaws and other parrots especially) have behaviors that would probably do nothing to improve their survival, yet when one thinks about it - may be linked to a trait that *does* improve survival.
Personally, I believe that a brain that has evolved the ability to communicate is the most likely to have these traits. However, since people tend to anthropomorphize I'm certain there are a plethora of other things that could also fit this concept that I, among many others, have missed.
(Is the run-on sentence a side-effect of survival traits? I hope so...)
Culture, Language, and Art (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:4, Interesting)
Once you've got a big brain and communication you start to make marks. Various animals, birds in particular, remember visual landmarks. Some smart early human realized he could MAKE visual landmarks for himself and his tribe. Even some other animals do this, scratching trees to mark territory for instance. Now communication and marking combine into what you might call early art. As a bonus it serves as a way of recording knowledge.
When you look at it carefully much of our vaunted uniqueness just looks like things other animals do, taken to the next level.
As for other traits, they've been quite well explained. Chances are if you took another species of great ape, kicked them out of the forest on the savanna and then made them survive through an ice age after a few million years you'd end up with a lot of dead apes and some really smart ones.
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, we don't know that. Elements of most "special" traits we think humans have are present in other species. Many use ad hoc tools (chimps strip twigs as termite extractors and dolphins have been known to use sea urchins as prods while teasing fish) and there was a furor awhile back about a crow filmed making a hook out of a piece of wire in order to extract food out of a narrow mouthed bottle. At best we seem to be the only species that has settled on "intelligence" in the inventive sense and "extrasomatic" means to adapt. We have off-loaded much of our evolutionary load onto more fluid means and methods that require less organismal redesign, but we are still observably part of a coninuum of such adaptation.
Also, evolution is at the base merely a means for a common (breeding) genepool to maintain itself through time. There are a number of different tactics that are used to achieve this, including "stupid but very fertile" (yeasts, bacteria, mice, rats, etc.) and "intelligent and careful" (elephants, humans, cetaceans). That really oversimplifies, but I am attempting to emphasize extremes. Many would consider me unfair to bacteria and truly over the top with rating humans as intelligent and careful.
By and large though, each lineage tracks its own tactical path into the future. Among humans, we are clustered into social groups that are also, roughly speaking, smaller inbreeding genepools. Each of these has the potential to "speciate," splitting off from the broader stock and going its own way. For over a century it has been a misconceived but popular truism that speciation must be an "all or nothing" event. The existence of mules and hybrids has always contractdicted this idea and has almost always been ignored popularly.
Part of this ignorance is due to a popular confusion between species and "kinds" in the biblical, or binary logical senses. That is, we are encouraged to think of species as XOR facts: e.g. the animal can be either dog or a wolf, chicken or a pigeon, not both. But species occasionally may simply be populations that have become behaviourally separated (Mulims and Christians, Amish and Atheists) - not that these latter examples are actually different species, but geneflow is reduced across social boundaries and where the rules are strict enough, the flow can be very restricted. Bacteria actually have several means of recombining DNA that are so permeable and strange that it raises questions about the actual idea of species. They can acquire new DNA through viral transmission (there's an image: bacterium with a cold), "sexual" exchange, and by scavenging free floating fragments (debris from dead bacteria) out of their environment. That happens to be what makes them so much of a problem in hospitals. They evolve quickly and effectively when challenged because they are pretty indiscriminant about their DNA sources.
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:3, Interesting)
You're dead right. A hundred or so years ago, stupid people did not live very long. Since the middle of the last century, we've been focussing on safety. Cars have seat belts, ABS brakes and air bags, so stupid people end up surviving road accidents. Machine tools have guards and interlocks, so stupid people don't go chopping off their limbs.
We have interfered with natural selection, allowing unfit people to survive. As a direct consequence of this, human stupidity will increase.
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:1, Interesting)
Very true, and very unfortunate fo rthe evolution of slashdotters. You have to get a girlfriend before you can evolve.
The dumbass with an IQ of 60 living in a trailer park or a city's slum with his twelve kids will have descendants who rule the world.
Meanwhile, the assburger in his mother's basement with an IQ if 297 will sadly never pass his genes along. Evolutionary dead end, he is.
More on topic, there are Better [newscientist.com] sources [livescience.com] of information that the Boston Herald. Gees, people! This is supposed to be a nerd site!
Re:There won't be any controversy here! (Score:2, Interesting)
That was a very coherent post with many good points.
However you mistyped "continuum" so, in standard Slashdot form, I will call you a fuckwad and claim your whole argument is bullshit.
Actually no. But, you say that "evolution is at the base merely a means for a common (breeding) genepool to maintain itself through time". I'm not quite sure I understand this statement. With every evolutionary step forward (mutation or adaptation), isn't the common genepool becoming less and less common, until it ultimately dissolves into one or many other distinct genepools? Also, that statement seems to claim that there is something intrinsically shaping the direction of evolution, or at least an intrinsic goal towards which every organism strives (the goal of maintaining its genepool, or proliferating, or whatever you consider evolution); some succeed, some fail.
But really, how would you define that goal? Without trying to further polarize the issue, it seems like it's really a choice between complete and utter randomness, or some form of "intelligent intervention". To say that every living organism ultimately strives towards one goal is to say that there is at least one universal truth, which implies a boundary, and thus absolute chaos cannot exist. Conversely, to say that every moment in 'time' is random, and that no event occurs with the goal of a future event (procreation, etc.), suggests that evolution, as humans have defined it, is only an arbitrary pattern carved out of chaos. So perhaps evolution falls more into place with intelligent design than with chaos...
This is me just shooting from the hip. Please feel free to refute any pseudo-philosophical premise that I've constructed, or just to simply call me a fuckwad.
Re:Evolution is NOT random (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't want to be misunderstood, however. Higher intelligence is not the goal of a lineage. Lots of critters (not to mention plants) do just fine without much at all, as they have ways of evading danger that we have only recently discovered. Bats aren't that smart, but hey, they have sonar to help them hunt their prey, and that's working good enough for them (though there is an "arms race" between some species of bats and their prey - some moths know how to screw up their sonar).
WE think intelligence is the most important because that's what we have - we lack speed, physical strength, decent sense of smell/hearing, echolocation and sonar, etc. etc. (by natural means, of course). But intelligence is just one way in which things can gain an upper hand. Evolution can't be thought of as a progression from "worms to people," (the old Linnaean system) - we're all just doing what we need to do to survive and reproduce.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
what your objection comes down to is... (Score:3, Interesting)
>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