Before anyone comes for me, I grew up southern baptist – went to a private christian school & was homeschooled for a few years. The extent of my “science” education when it came to evolution & the origin of the universe was “if we came from monkeys why do monkeys still exist?” and “look at this galaxy that’s shaped like a cross, isn’t god amazing!!” I’m an atheist now and would like to have some sort of understanding of how our world came to be, but trying to figure it out as an adult with no real foundation has been incredibly difficult, and none of it’s making sense. I also know I’m asking a lot as all 3 of those subjects are pretty extensive, so if you know any good videos or books I’d love some recommendations!
In: Biology
>“if we came from monkeys why do monkeys still exist?”
If you came from your parents, why do your parents still exist? A more accurate representation of how evolution works would be like monkeys are our cousins.
The common ancestor species between humans and any other apes is long extinct, but the idea is that one group of thay species was separated from the other, and they were separated long enough that they experienced different pressures from their environments. Random mutations in their genes would occasionally prove either beneficial or hurtful. The beneficial mutations mean that the individual with said mutation would be more likely to survive and pass on that mutated gene. Repeat this millions of times, and then you have a new species.
A more recent example of this is very easy to show with our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. They live very close together, but about 1.8 million years ago, they were separated by a river changing course. The bonobos were in a very resource rich area, and the chimpanzees were in a resource poor area. As a result, the chimpanzees evolved to be more aggressive, meaning they’d be more likely to secure food for themselves, and live to reproduce, but the bonobos evolved to be more friendly, so they could work together and share food and find mates.
If there were an aggressive bonobo, it would be shunned from the group, but if there were a generous chimp, it would be getting less food.
This is natural selection at work, the driving force behind evolution.
We can also very easily show artifical selection with how we breed plants and animals. We find the ones with desirable traits, and we breed them, so their children have those desirable traits. We haven’t been doing this long enough to create a new species, but we have definitely left our mark on their genetics.
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