“Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes”
—Is there anyone that can explain where the author got this idea from?
I don’t know what the ‘firstthings’ site is about, but I’ve read a number of articles on this fossil find and this the first I’ve seen of anyone suggesting such a thing - and the suggestion makes zero sense. I think they are really confused.
It used to be thought that the common ancestor would be essentially a chimp anatomically, and that it was humans that did virtually all the changing physically while chimps changed little since the common ancestor. But the fossil evidence indicates that humans changed less than thought while chimps changed more than thought, and so the common ancestor is as close anatomically to humans as it is to chimps. In other words, the common ancestor is probably as much human-like as it is chimp-like and is roughly an even mixture of both, instead of being mostly a chimp.
Perhaps they are confusing statements from scientists that the common ancestor is ‘less chimp-like’ than thought before for ‘not ape-like’?
And certainly not from a “lump of mud” as GGG so vigorously contends...
That's what I think is most fascinating about this story. It's really hard to shake the unspoken idea that we're somehow the pinnacle of evolution. The notion that chimps have actually evolved more since our common ancestor than we have really shakes up that worldview.
It used to be thought that the common ancestor would be essentially a chimp anatomically, and that it was humans that did virtually all the changing physically while chimps changed little since the common ancestor. But the fossil evidence indicates that humans changed less than thought while chimps changed more than thought, and so the common ancestor is as close anatomically to humans as it is to chimps. In other words, the common ancestor is probably as much human-like as it is chimp-like and is roughly an even mixture of both, instead of being mostly a chimp.
That sounds like an awful wordy way of understanding evolutionists get awfully worked up, some to the point of lawsuits, because people rightly understand God created man in His image after all.
Maybe Darwin did get it completely and utterly wrong.
The evidence is certainly pointing more and more to that...with this and “Ardi” here lately.