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HigHurtenflurst on 19 April 2014
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Turkish said:
HigHurtenflurst said:
Turkish said:
HigHurtenflurst said:
Turkish said:
I just dont understand why apes didnt evolve

They did. Apes and humans have evolved by exactly the same amount since whenever their common ancestors were around.

but why dont they look like us if we originally looked the same

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.

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.

Scoobes has mentioned most of what I was going to answer with (humans just happen to be the surviving hominid, just as other modern apes will have branched off other doomed species, and modern apes don't look like those from 5 million years ago)

Also you are underestimating the intelligence of modern apes, they are likely far more intelligent than apes of the past (just not to the extent humans are). And you are again assuming evolution has some kind of ultimate species goal, just as evolution is not a progression towards humanity it is not a progression towards higher intelligence alone. While intelligence is a positive trait like faster movement or higher strength, they come at a price to other bodily functions and the limitations of the physical world, the process of evolution finds the right balance to help survival in the 'short' term.

As for human babies being unable to walk, that's partly due to higher intelligence, partly the more complex way we walk. Many other higher primates cannot walk at birth (instead they cling to their mother)... Walking upright, with a heel to toe motion rather than all on toes (as with most 4 legged mammals) is a more complicated method of walking that requires longer to learn. Our high intelligence also means larger heads, which means human babies are more top-heavy to it's harder to balance upright. Larger heads is also why humans have relatively early births compared to brain development (babies head has to fit through the pelvis). Many mammals brains are fully developed at birth but humans are born sooner with more brain development after birth.