Next up: Stephen Hawking clears up the misunderstanding that the sun revolves around the earth, explaining that it is, in fact, the other way around: The earth revolves around the sun.

A nice explanation, but I don't really think it truly addresses the question. The assumption the question is based on is that there is a set progression of steps from one form to another. The misunderstanding is thus: humans were once chimps, chimps evolved into humans and thus there should be no more chimps because they are now all humans. There are several fallacies in that thinking.

1. The scientific evidence suggests chimps and humans share an ancestor, rather than one being descendant from another.
2. The 'common' thinking is when a species evolves they all evolve. The evidence suggests evolution comes from an individual or a group of individuals, id est. a advantageous genetic trait/s being passed on from an individual.
3. The question also suggests the parent species has to die out or become extinct. While this is often the case in evolution it isn't the rule. In some cases a better adapted species arises from a population and out competes the parents species for resources. In other cases a portion of the parent species becomes isolated in a geographic location. That population evolves to better adapt to that geographic location, but others of that species continue to exist else where unchanged. Thus you can have a parent species and a descendants both alive and thriving at the same time.

OHHH GODDD.... WHAT IF HE'S WRONG.....

Lol. who's that girl representing humans. His girlfriend?!
HIS GIRLFREIEND IS A CHIMP!
Moth**f**ing chimp rapist.

I'm saddened by the fact that there is a need for overly simplified videos like this one.

the human african ape is so much hotter than her cousins

>> ^Ornthoron:
I'm saddened by the fact that there is a need for overly simplified videos like this one.

It is a remarkably simple question to answer, obviously, but it is surprising how little most people seem to grasp about evolution, I have heard this question from people who are in no way creationists or even remotely opposed to evolution or science.

Evolution by natural selection is a remarkably simple idea, yet it is almost endless in its explanatory power. However the very fact that no-one got it quite right before Darwin (and Wallace) is a good sign of how unintuitive it is to us, both the idea that you can get complexity gradually, the enormous timescales involved and the sheer purposeless nature of the whole thing makes it difficult to grasp. The last point, i think, is the hardest to get, I have read books by scientists who don't seem to really grasp the non-directional nature of evolution. Deep inside, the idea that it is somehow directed towards making us, humans, seem ingrained in most people's mind, phrases like "more evolved" "higher up on the evolutionary tree" etc are often wildly misplaced and over-used.

Chimpanzees are here for the same reason we humans , and all other animals, are here: they failed to go extinct. That really is all. They have found a way to thrive and survive , and thats all it really takes. Their ancestors were also successful survivors, and it so happens that those ancestors gave rise to another kind of ape, the Homo Sapiens.

I like the idea that people still use "why does we still gots monkeys?" as a gotcha question to evolutionists.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
>> ^Ornthoron:
I'm saddened by the fact that there is a need for overly simplified videos like this one.

he last point, i think, is the hardest to get, I have read books by scientists who don't seem to really grasp the non-directional nature of evolution. Deep inside, the idea that it is somehow directed towards making us, humans, seem ingrained in most people's mind, phrases like "more evolved" "higher up on the evolutionary tree" etc are often wildly misplaced and over-used.

I think a large portion of those scientists subscribe to what I call the anthropic fallacy. They use the anthropic principle to argue backwards that humans are a teleological certainty. It's a subtle logical fallacy. Normally, you would say:
1. If humans are to exist, the laws of the universe need to be such and such.
2. Humans exist.
3. Therefore, the laws of the universe are such and such.

Of course, it's tautological and doesn't say much. So, many are tempted to extrapolate and some come to the strong anthropic principle, which says too much and is indeterminable, or they try to be smart and say things like this:
1. If humans are to exist, the laws of the universe need to be such and such.
2. The laws of the universe are such and such.
3. Therefore, humans are to exist (i.e. they must exist at some time in this universe).

This looks logically true if you use material implication, but it is in fact false when using the semantically correct counterfactual conditional. That the laws of a universe are indeed such and such as to allow humans does not implicate that humans exist in that universe, just that they can exist. So as you said, evolution does the rest. Evolution may be random or not, but we won't settle that with pure logic. Any determinist or materialist should put is money on "not random" though of course not random does in no way imply design or anything of that sort.

You'd think this would all be very obvious from the word DESCENDED alone. No one thinks that people are sometimes descended from their siblings or cousins.

. . . wait, no, I guess a few people really are descended from their siblings and cousins. Maybe they're the same ones that are having trouble with this.

African apes?! God Westy is at it again!!!

>> ^rebuilder:
Next up: Stephen Hawking clears up the misunderstanding that the sun revolves around the earth, explaining that it is, in fact, the other way around: The earth revolves around the sun.


Hate to be THAT guy, but as both bodies have mass/angular momentum, they revolve around each other. Of course, with the disparity in mass - the earth must move more to abide by conservation of energy/Newtons 3rd law,
"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. "

All well and good.

Where did all the common descendants go?

I guess we killed them all in a blood frenzy over resources, and it seems the common ancestors of these dead ancestors met a similar fate, and their ancestors also met a similar fate, and their ancestors also met a similar fate

It would have been nice if he had shown some skeletons of our common ancestors - that would help show the evolutionary steps.

Where did all the common descendants go?

Huh? evolution doesnt make common descendants, it branches like a tree, and like the tree, the twigs dont grow together again, they become increasingly separated. The common ancestor we share with chimps would, to us, probably look something like a chimp, because they lived in the jungle much like the chimp does today. At some point, some of these apes, perhaps because of some environmental factor (shortage of food, rival apes, changing climate etc) started going into the steps, at first perhaps in short trips, etc. Evolution then started to favour the ability to make these trips, and gradually, generation after generation, some started basically living outside of the jungle, they evolved into bipedal apes, freed their hands, shed their coat and grew bigger and bigger brains.


Other parts of these chimp-like creatures stayed in the jungle and made a living there, these are now what we call chimps.

It would have been nice if he had shown some skeletons of our common ancestors - that would help show the evolutionary steps.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Could-we-be-related-to-other-apes-Yes-We-are

Double huh? Mutations don't collectively occur across a group - they occur in individuals. These individuals then make a new species (which can be from as little as a single gene changing). The rest of the group (which don't have the mutation) remain the same as before. This group would be the common ancestor.

Even so, using your example, some of the chimp like ancestors remained - they are the ascendant group - where are they?

Can you point to evidence of the common ancestoral groups that we stem from still alive?

Interesting video. I guess we can't definitively know whether any skeletons from dead mammals are truly related to us or not unless we can get a DNA sample

edit: add "gene"

staying ignorant because it makes baby jesus happy