Hi to everyone, I had a discussion with a serious creationist recently. It was interesting, and I wanted to put some of my findings and comments up for you to checkout if you are interested. This discussion was internet based so all quotes are exact … with some grammatical corrections. The original discussion can be found here beginning with the 14th post on this page. I’d love to hear any of your ideas on the links in this article and maybe we can discuss this some more. If this topic is too hot for you, feel free to leave it alone. There’s no harm in learning someone else’s opinions … sometimes …

They [people believing in evolution] say that we evolved from apes etc etc, right? Well, if we evolved then how come the other ape species stayed the same?

This is a very common misconception. We did not evolve from “apes” (as you and I know them). In fact, consider the other primates that currently reside on our planet as distant cousins. Way back, we can be traced to the different species of hominid, but neither humans, our cousin [chimps, guerrillas, etc...], nor the past hominid that we share as a direct relative are the same. Consider the relationship that you, your cousin, and your grandmother have. An example of this ancestral tree is here.

How come we were the only species who evolved to the extent we did? Surely, if we evolved there should have been another type of species who would have evolved to the SAME extent we did?

When thinking about “evolved to the SAME extent” you need to remember that evolution can take time a long time (not necessarily in the case of the Anoli). It seems that through natural selection and perhaps environmental reasons, our branch of the tree developed improved use of tools and eventually agriculture. We eventually came to be as we are now. This (for us) took a very long time.

Let’s say, for argument sake, we did evolve from the ape – then how come there isn’t any hard piece of writing (even by tongue) ANYWHERE of someone who wrote about his great great grandmother being less evolved than he is?

Let’s look at the human fossil record shall we? The Smithsonian has a really detailed Human Fossil Record Tree. The reason that there are not stories “my grandmother wasn’t very evolved” is because you would never have noticed. Our life span is too short to see a drastic variance in the genetic makeup of our species. In fact, it tends to be a significant survivable mutation that is the basis of a new species. For hominids, this took many millions of years or as one friend pointed out about “100,000 generations.”

For more on human evolution check the Smithsonian’s Hominid Start Page! To learn about he evolution of human speach, you might be interested in this article by the BBC.

I hope you look at some of these sites and give your thoughts. Thanks for the interesting discussion!