Chimpanzees are not our ancestors
“Evolution: Education and Outreach” journal is a brilliant attempt to grow awareness and help in understanding principles of evolution among students, teachers and scientists.One can take part in this attempt by contributing articles about evolution and the teaching of evolution on a variety of topics from cosmology to genetics and earth history to the evolution of cultural artifacts. The reviews in this journal are written in easily understandable manner and another important point is that it can accessed freely online till end of 2009.
The journal will connect teachers with scientists by adapting cutting-edge, peer reviewed articles for classroom use on a variety of instructional levels. Teachers and scientists will collaborate on multi-authored papers and offer tools for teachers such as unit and lesson plans and classroom activities, as well as additional online content such as podcasts and powerpoint presentations.
Yesterday as usual i was going through the new issue of “Evolution: Education and Outreach” and came across a very well written article from Anastasia Thanukos titled “Darwin’s “Extreme” Imperfection?”. As many know fossils give us valuable clues to various life forms existed once on planet and this work mainly focus on missing links in the fossil record .Formation of fossil depends on many factors and soft bodied organisms have least tendency to leave their mark in history. Darwin was always worried about haphazard preservation and considered it to be a serious problem for the theory of evolution. Direct fossil evidence of all the intermediate forms connecting an ancestor to its modern descendants would have provided undeniable evidence in favor of his theory. I don’t want to go into details further and suggest you to read this excellent article completely.( Click here to see the pdf )
Today we will look into few general misconceptions about evolution, which are mentioned in the article.
Chimpanzees are the evolutionary cousins of humans :
This happens to be one of the most prominent misconception generally seen among non science people that humans have evolved from chimpanzees.But this is not true at all – in fact chimps are more like cousins to humans. If one take a look at simplified evolutionary tree will show that like humans ,chimps also occupy a place at the tip of the branch on the phylogenetic tree.
To simplify things : We humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzee ,which was neither a chimpanzee nor human, and we are both linked to that ancestor by our own chains of descent, made up of organisms with transitional features. Additionally we are so much focused on our own history and while doing that we tend to ignore the evolutionary history of various other life forms like chimps, reptiles, birds, insects and bacteria . Like humans, all other life forms have unique evolutionary histories leading to the present day modern forms and this they do by retaining some characters exhibited by ancestors and on the other hand evolving some new characters which will help them adapt better to to their habitat. Another important thing is that people generally tend to imagine evolution as a huge progressive ladder and we humans occupying the top spot . However evolution forms a very bushy tree (not at all ladder) and we are just one of many leaves on the tree of life.
Reference :
Darwin’s “Extreme” Imperfection?
Anastasia Thanukos
Evo Edu Outreach (2009) 2:84–89
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