Turkish said:
HigHurtenflurst said:
Evolution is not a progression towards humanity, if you go back far enough every living thing on Earth "looked the same". The process of evolution leads to complexity and diversity.
What you seem to be thinking is that humans are the "most evolved" lifeform on the planet... we are not, I can think of three ways of looking at it: One way is that all current species are equally evolved because they have spent an equal amount of time evolving since their common ancestor. (or at least all complex life... some forms of life, particularly some simple life like prokaryotes may have evolved entirely seperately) A second way is that a more evolved species has simply spent more time as that species... ie if it were possible to send an individual back in time, how far back could it go before reproduction with it's ancestors became impossible (I don't think this way makes much sense, particularly as it is ignores things like asexual reproduction). A third way is that the most evolved form is that which has changed the most often, which is kind of the opposite of the above in a way.
Arguably the "winner" or most evolved form for the second & third ways would be something prokaryotic like bacteria. I think the first way makes most sense though because evolution is a continuous process, every current species is equally evolved.
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Well, there are so many different kind of apes, and if one kind, the humans evolved to look like us, why did the gorilla, chimpanzee and every other race still look the same? Why did only the human grow so different? They both grew up in similar natural conditions, it also baffles me how the human is the only live form that grew intelligent, and while the other live forms of the earth are not intelligent, they know exactly how to survive(birds building nests without prior knowledge, apes using plants to heal themselves, animal babies able to walk etc), the human baby is not able to do that.
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We weren't the only ones; we're the only ones to have survived. If you look at human evolution there were actually multiple species of humans just like there are multiple species of apes. The difference is, the others went extinct.
Why? The main theory is that our extra brain power required a lot of energy (approx. 2% of a humans total body mass but with approx. 20% energy requirement) and any food shortages would be especially difficult on the intelligent hominin species. Genetic diversity (or rather the lack of it) among modern humans also points to the fact we struggled to survive in the past, and were also near extinction.
As for the other apes, they also look very different to our Great Ape common ancestor.
And human baby development? These links will probably explain it better than me:
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131332388/growing-slowly-humans-outsmarted-neanderthals
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/advantages-of-helpless/