Some questions of evolution that hopefully some of you can clear up.

reply to post by hippomchippo


My question asked about why a giraffe could have a long neck or how humans can evolve from apes. It is not like i went against it and said that the earth was created 6000 years ago. I was simply wondering a few things. If you call ridiculous, I surely don’t want to know what you think of some of the religious talks on ATS

I think that the nipple question is a very good one.
I think men have smaller nipples because we used to breast feed as well, why else? I remember reading about men that start producing some type of milk when their wives are pregnant. I believe that is proof of evolution.
The giraffes I think that they were having trouble reaching the trees and were stretching their necks to get to the fruits and this was recorded in the genes and the next generation of them had longer necks because of this. Just like some birds do the rain dance without ever seeing another bird do it and they know exactly how to do it, it is in their genes and it gets passed along and some times it gets modified to help them.
I think this makes sense and that it is not far away from what scientists might find. It just took me a couple of minutes to come up with this answer and I don't have any proof of this but you can find videos of domestic animals doing what other animals do in the wild. How else can they know what to do?

Originally posted by Maddogkull
reply to post by hippomchippo

 

My question asked about why a giraffe could have a long neck or how humans can evolve from apes. It is not like i went against it and said that the earth was created 6000 years ago. I was simply wondering a few things. If you call ridiculous, I surely don’t want to know what you think of some of the religious talks on ATS

And once again, I never said you were a creationist, I said the argument you said in this thread is used by them, and I bet you really wouldn't want to know what I think of religious talks here, aswell as new age talks

this is a rather young post...

www.whyevolution.com...

Originally posted by Elieser
I think that the nipple question is a very good one.
I think men have smaller nipples because we used to breast feed as well, why else? I remember reading about men that start producing some type of milk when their wives are pregnant. I believe that is proof of evolution.
The giraffes I think that they were having trouble reaching the trees and were stretching their necks to get to the fruits and this was recorded in the genes and the next generation of them had longer necks because of this. Just like some birds do the rain dance without ever seeing another bird do it and they know exactly how to do it, it is in their genes and it gets passed along and some times it gets modified to help them.
I think this makes sense and that it is not far away from what scientists might find. It just took me a couple of minutes to come up with this answer and I don't have any proof of this but you can find videos of domestic animals doing what other animals do in the wild. How else can they know what to do?

Another interesting thing is that the platypus has no nipples yet gives milk, it literally seeps out of their chest.

First, as stated several times within this thread, humans didn't evolve from apes.
apes and humans evolved from a common ancestor, apes went one direction and we went the other, obviously we got the luck of the draw.

As far as giraffes go, stop looking at it the way you do and look at it like any other "trait" that gets passed on from parents to their children.

As far as humans go modern science and medicine have pretty much eliminated "natural selection", its probably safe to that that there are quite a few of us here who without modern medicine may not be alive today, such as diabetics or patients with any other diseases, premature babies wouldn't likely make it in a "natural world" and though it sounds a bit twisted, if all of us who have medical defects or were born with complications were in a "natural world" we would die off and thus our genes and chances of spreading those defects onto our offspring wouldn't be likely, and eventually those defects would work themselves out of the human race.


evolution works in a similar way for example, two creatures produce offspring and their offspring has some sort of "defect" as compared to its parents, now this "defect" may be beneficial or it may not be. If its not beneficial and hinders the creatures ability to fend for itself then it will die off and that "defect" wont carry on because that creature didn't produce offspring.
now if that "defect" was beneficial and doesn't hinder its ability to fend for itself, then eventually that creature with the "defect" will produce offspring and "may" pass on that "defect" and this process can go either way and if it continues to get passed on then the "defect" eventually becomes part of that species characteristics.

that's how giraffes got their long necks, the "defect" was beneficial and by "luck" got passed onto the the next generation of whatever it was before and eventually it became a characteristic of that species.

The other animals (not giraffes) came from different places and did not need to stretch their necks and probably eat grass or other animals. In the area that they lived they did not need long necks and they evolved slowly to help themselves to get the food that was in their area and to protect themselves from other animals that were "visiting".

They are waiting to take over the world...those damned dirty apes.

We didn't evolve from apes.

I think maybe evolutionary science is a bit out of your intellectual league, or you would not have asked such a simplistic question.

Maybe you should try a religion that can put the worlds history into a child likes story line. Maybe only a few thousand years starting with us just appearing in a cloud of fairy dust.

Wow ! I wanted to say a lot but a lot has been said.

Common ancestor / check.

My understanding for the long neck of a Giraffe is this.

In nature there is in existence to say it simple.
1. The need for food.
2. The need to reproduce.

It's all about the need to eat and reproduce. This means that for anything eatable there is an animal around to eat it. If their isn't. They say there is a biological niche. ( An empty place) This niche will soon be filled but in the case of the Giraffe, the Giraffe was the only one available to fill the niche. Because of a little evolutionary gift they share with a forrest dweller called the Okapi. ( About the size of a horse )
This evolutionary gift stops there blood from rushing to their brains while drinking by closing of their arteries leading to the brain. (edit While they lower their head) Any other animal with a neck that long would ( while drinking like a Giraffe does ) soon pass out and been eaten. And it could also be a sexual attraction toward female Giraffes. The one with the longest wins.

Fun fact.
Did you know that the closest related land animal to a Dolphin is a Hippopotamus.

Somewhere on an island far from civilisation. ( near Australia ) There was also a niche, this niche was one high up in the trees but it has been filled by an animal as big as a dog and the looks of a bear. But I bring it up to give a good example for my story. The bear dog has the strangest relatives on mainland Australia. Kangaroos. What do you know.

Who would have ever thought of a kangaroo like animal high up in the trees.

[edit on 25-3-2010 by Sinter Klaas]

reply to post by Maddogkull


This has to be at least the fifth time I've seen this question asked here on ATS. To answer your first question we didn't evolve from apes, we merely share a common ancestor. To answer your second question giraffes didn't intend to evolve long necks, one of the giraffes ancestors was mutated with a slightly longer neck which through the generations got longer because it was a good trait.

Originally posted by Blackmarketeer
We didn't evolve from apes, anymore than we evolved from the Neanderthals or Eructus. They are a different branch of the same evolutionary tree. Current theory is that we have a common ancestor dating back around 6 million years ago.

Homo Eructus? Uhmm .. 'burping man'?

In 1871, Darwin predicted that it was probably a species of ape living in Africa that was a common ancestor of modern humans and today's great apes. Advances in geology, climate reconstruction and genetics, coupled with the recovery of key fossils, lead scientists to believe that Darwin was indeed correct.
Humans, chimpanzees and gorillas all originated in Africa, theoretically speaking via Darwin's Origin and share some features in common, but all unambiguously belong to different species.

A key event in the origin of the hominin (extant humans) was the formation of the Great Rift Valley. Knowledge of early hominins is heavily based on finds in this and surrounding regions. Twenty million years ago, Africa was fairly level and covered from the west coast to the east coast in tropical forests housing a wide range of species of monkeys and apes. About fifteen million years ago, tectonic activity caused a profound disruption to this landscape. The Great Rift Valley created an east-west geographical barrier to the movement of animal populations and so promoted differential speciation each side of the divide.
The new geographical conditions led to the formation of an ecological mosaic of different environments and seems to have been a good place for primates to live and evolve.
The rain shadow effect of the eastern highlands was complemented by a cooling and drying of the climate in the Miocene Epoch. It is commonly thought that it was on this border between forest and open savannah that the speciation events occurred, forcing the separation of lineages leading to the chimps and gorillas and hominins.

The adaptations you observe in different species are due to phenotypic variance, that is the variance of those characteristics of an organism that have been shaped by both genotype and environmental influences. Evolution of a species is not purely concerned with either one exclusively. So the differences you see in giraffes, for example, in contrast to other surrounding species, are due to changes in the base sequence of the giraffe's DNA, as well as adapting environmental conditions factoring in as an influence.

reply to post by kinda kurious


Men have nipples because all humans begin sexless. So men form nipples in the uterus before the hormones decide their gender.

reply to post by thedeadtruth


Wow, I’m sorry looks like everyone can’t be as smart as you. But I am content with the knowledge I have. And thanks to ATS members now I have more knowledge on evolution. It is funny how people like you just go on a thread like this to just say stupid comments. What’s the point, you get off to stuff like this.

reply to post by thedeadtruth


Wow, I’m sorry looks like everyone can’t be as smart as you. But I am content with the knowledge I have. And thanks to ATS members now I have more knowledge on evolution. It is funny how people like you just go on a thread like this to just say stupid comments. What’s the point, you get off to stuff like this.

why haven't we evolved to live forever or longer or heal faster when clearly it's a survival issue??

Originally posted by nightrun
why haven't we evolved to live forever or longer or heal faster when clearly it's a survival issue??

Because animals don't live for ever.
We don't need to heal faster because we do that already through technology, I fully expect humans to have incredibly weak immune systems more further down the line.
There is no thought to evolution, it is simply to survive and reproduce

[edit on 25-3-2010 by hippomchippo]

reply to post by nightrun


Because we don't get to choose how we evolve. You people act like evolution plans things out, it's just random mutations. Also it's not clearly a survival issue, we're the most successful species on Earth.

Suppose there is one species that lives in the trees of a huge forest. Then, one day a big fire burns down half the forest. Those members of the species in the burnt part mostly die, but a few are left. We'll call them "Group A". Those in the unburnt portion continue to live as they always have. We'll call them "Group B."

The members of Group B are doing fine and continue on in their normal lifestyle. Group A, on the other hand, has experienced severe trauma and most of them are dead. The survivors must forage among a new and hostile environment...the burnt-out shell of a roasted forest. They stumble around on the ground -- unfamiliar terrain. Most of these are picked off by predators, but the smartest, most cunning, and the luckiest few manage to survive. They breed among themselves, producing tough, smart offspring that are able to survive in the new, hostile environment. Those who are able to run a bit faster, hide a bit better, and outwit the predators survive, and they in turn breed with each other, producing more offspring with these traits. This goes on for several generations until finally the members of Group A have the skills and smarts they need to survive on the ground. They no longer need to live in trees. As time goes on, they become so different from the still-tree-dwelling Group B as to become a different type of animal: A smarter, tougher, faster ground-dweller. Group B, meanwhile, continues basically as it always has, up in the trees.

So, you can see how different species differentiate and break off from each other.