[MA]

Don't think of a monkey gradually becoming a human. Think about great apes and humans sharing a common ancestor a few million years ago. The way lots of people think about homo evolving from monkeys seems to imply that other apes would eventually evolve into modern humans.

Yeah, if you think the gap between us is too wide, just break it down. We're not so far from cavemen, they're not so far from flatfaced hominids, they're not so far from upright apes, and they're not so far from particularly ambitious proto-chimps.

Because you're right, hominids are a seperate group from lemurs and the like. They're just both derived from a common ancestor, and that's impossible to deny because it's also true of literally every species on earth. Go back far enough, and you'll find a forefather species that diverged into humans, slugs, beetles and sequoia trees.

We can't have come from any non-ape because we currently are a variety of ape. This has been very well known for a very long time. When Carl Linnaeus founded the field of taxonomy (a nested hierarchical structure for the classification of living things) he couldn't put the human species anywhere else, and he tried. This was pre-Darwin, and he likely believed in special creation (though his studies did some work eroding that assumption), he wasn't happy about it, but he saw, clearly, that every part of our anatomy is ape anatomy. We have all the same structures. We now know that we have all the same genes, in fact some of the genes that have the physical effects that set us apart are not special human genes, but rather broken versions of monkey genes. That's why, for example, we have such tiny and weak jaws: the genetics required for strong, robust jaws like other primates have are all fucked up, but that opens the way for a larger cranium.

We are apes for the same reason that ducks are birds. "Ape" is not a different kind of animal, it is a group, a subset of old-world monkeys, which are a subset of primates, which are a subset of mammals. And the Homo genus is a subset of great ape. We can construct from comparative genetics very detailed family trees. We know that from the combined lineage of the great apes, the common ancestor of all four genera of great ape, it was the orang-utan lineage that broke away first. Then the gorilla lineage broke away in at the next fork. Then the human and chimpanzee lineages split apart. Of the various species they each gave rise to, only one human and two chimpanzee species remain. The very same evidence that proves that we evolved also proves our shared ancestry with modern non-human apes.

you guys are convincing me. and i don't mean that to sound pretentious or anything either, i'm just equally convinced that we never derived from apes, but i understand how we could have. i'm in two minds about it, i guess.

i still hold onto my "we were planted here" idea though, but only as a slight possibility.

you never know. we could be wrong, man. we could be wrong.