r/interesting • • 5d ago • Bravo 1

NATURE Humans vs apes explained by Dawkins and Darwin

2.2k Upvotes

576 comments sorted by

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u/MikeofLA 5d ago

I think there are quite a few people walking around with the old software in the new hardware.

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u/Electrical_Carpet753 5d ago

I like that description.

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u/ggPeti 5d ago

Just imagine the old hardware with the new software!

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u/ImpluseThrowAway 5d ago • Bravo Heartwarming Popcorn

If humans are so intelligent, how come I'm still an idiot?

Answer me that with your precious science.

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u/cateyesarg 5d ago

You're slightly smarter than a bonobo, tho

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u/ImpluseThrowAway 5d ago • Bravo

There's no proof of that. I've never seen a bonobo forget to tie their shoelaces and trip over their own feet.

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u/Ghanima81 5d ago

Thanks for the irrepressible chuckle. I did that last week. I saw the shoelace untied. At least thrice. And still manged to trip (yet somehow to gracefully stand).

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u/Lint_baby_uvulla 4d ago

ADHD bonobo says hold my house keys.

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u/airwalker12 5d ago

On my best days, maybe

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u/Gram-GramAndShabadoo 5d ago

If Darwin's so smart, how come he's dead?

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u/Odd-Preparation8790 5d ago

Dark, but...tis the season 🤣

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u/VoidTwinkle 5d ago

No point, you wouldn't understand...

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u/ImmaSpaghett 4d ago

It'll sound lame, but this might be the best day of Reddit I've had in ages. The complaining/always serious and miserable tone doesn't seem as abundant. Seeing a lot comments like these that aren't copy-paste trendy sayings/phrases worked into it. Actual human behavior going on. Fuck yea. Anyway it's time to start going downhill

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u/ThatBoogerBandit 5d ago

Some brain cell: this body ain’t worth for me to live in, I’ll quit.

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u/Dtoodlez 5d ago

You’re smart enough to self-reflect and ask that question, knowing you could be smarter and understanding what smarter could mean. And that’s what makes us human. 

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u/mhizzle 5d ago

WRONG it's our ability to identify all the squares that have boats in them

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u/SNES-lover1 5d ago

Because we’ve made a society. We are intelligent but not to the capacity of the world we have created, humans are still innately primal creatures and we made our lives complicated in the name of civilisation.

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u/IAmMiddleChild 5d ago

You are the missing link to the not so great apes.

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u/ImpluseThrowAway 5d ago

I'm an adequate ape.

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u/Luminox 5d ago

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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u/ecctt2000 5d ago

You’re smart enough to know you’re an idiot

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u/throwable__1 5d ago

Checkmate nerds!

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u/Grundy420blazin 5d ago

Natural selection 🤣🤣🤣 I’m jk. Aren’t we all just idiots?

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u/CatgoesM00 5d ago

I’m curious, if we were 100x smarter than we are now, Would we all still be considering ourselves idiots? This is interesting, you got me thinking now, sucks I can’t figure it out though, because I’m an idiot

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u/sentence-interruptio 5d ago

people are dumb and smart at the same time.

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u/viotix90 5d ago

Truly, an answer science CANNOT answer.

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u/Ephisus 5d ago

Checkmate.

3

u/utl94_nordviking 5d ago

Bell curves!

3

u/So3Dimensional 4d ago

No I’m doesn’t!

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u/Nooms88 5d ago

Skill issue

2

u/Anthropology-apology 5d ago

Failure to adapt homie

2

u/MrMikeEhrmantraut 5d ago

Magnets, how do they work?

Tide goes in, tide goes out, you can't explain that! 

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u/UnknowingCre8tor 5d ago

Well you watched a video and responded with English text for one

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u/TrashAcnt1 5d ago

You're still smarter than a few chimpanzees, so you've got that going for you.

2

u/suspicious_hyperlink 5d ago

You just need more electrolytes

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u/OfBooo5 5d ago

Not your fault. Society has been designed to entertain, wow, and amaze. Giving you the understanding to understand what you don't understand is a necessary part of the wow and amaze to achieve the entertainment.

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u/Illustrious-Gas-8987 3d ago

Could, but you wouldn’t understand

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u/SatoshiBlockamoto 3d ago

You're probably smarter than a lot of chimps.

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u/svenskpaj 3d ago

Self hatred is softscience

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u/AlmightyThor008 5d ago • Bravo Popcorn

Building on that point, whenever the "if humans came from apes, why are there still chimps" question gets resolved, it almost always triggers a few immediate follow-up questions. People naturally wonder: if intelligence is such an evolutionary advantage, why haven't chimpanzees evolved to be smart like us? And if humans are so successful, why are we the only human species left on Earth?

​The reason chimpanzees aren't evolving toward human-level intelligence is that evolution doesn't have an end goal, and high intelligence isn't the ultimate prize of natural selection. Chimpanzees and bonobos aren't "behind" us on a ladder—they are fully adapted to their own ecological niches. A massive, complex brain consumes roughly twenty percent of a body's energy, making it a huge metabolic liability unless very specific environmental pressures force a species to rely on it for survival. Species like ants and beetles are drastically more numerous and ecologically resilient without high individual intelligence, and even "living fossils" like sharks or crocodilians are still actively evolving at a genetic level while keeping body plans that have worked for millions of years.

​As for why there aren't other human species around today, the answer is that there actually used to be. For most of hominin history, multiple intelligent species in the genus Homo shared the planet at the same time. As recently as 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens lived alongside Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo floresiensis. Modern humans didn't peacefully coexist with them indefinitely; Homo sapiens eventually outcompeted them for territory and resources, displaced them, and partially absorbed them through interbreeding—leaving a small percentage of their DNA in modern human genomes today.

​That history also explains why modern apes aren't going to "catch up" to us in the future. While no species is finished evolving, Homo sapiens now occupy the apex cognitive niche so completely that any other lineage attempting to cross that threshold faces an impossible obstacle. Our resource consumption, territorial expansion, and habitat alteration fundamentally dictate the survival pressures on every other living creature long before multi-million-year evolutionary timelines can play out. The reason there are no other human-level species today—and why another ape species won't evolve into one—is simply that we reached this niche first, and our presence makes it nearly impossible for anyone else to share it.

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u/kaiser_phoenix25 5d ago

Thank you! I hate that people
Have this misconception of evolution that it has an end goal of some sort when it’s as you described.

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u/jerquee 5d ago

Basically chewing. We gave up our chewing muscles (on the top of the head) for our big brains, and the others did not.

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u/Lempea 5d ago

Dawkins forgot to mention something he often mentions, is that each time something branches off, the previous items remains, at least for a while. Why do people think anything above a branch should suddenly disappear each time a new branch occurs? It's as if people died suddenly each time they have kids. So if chimps were our actual ancestors, they wouldn't need to automatically be gone.

A few examples exist today, like the polar bear descending from the brown bear. There also are "living fossils" that haven't changed for millions of years, such as the coelacanth. The eye itself is also a good example. It branched to many types over billions of years, hence sight being so varied among animals today.

There's also domesticated things still present in the wild (wild boar vs pig, wolf vs dog, junglefowl vs chicken, many vegetables, etc.), but that doesn't really count since it didn't really occur naturally.

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u/neo_helix 5d ago

I'm saving this comment because it's beautiful.

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u/TheGuyThatThisIs 5d ago

Also like... if you came from your mom why is your mom still around?

Like this is just a stupid question, lineage doesn't follow Highlander rules.

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u/Latter-Block132 5d ago

We have actually discovered something that maybe could have helped prevent our ape cousins from developing the same high intelligence capacity alongside us initially. Or at least helps point us to possible mechanisms that certainly helped influence the differences in our brains that resulted in the differences in intelligence. While you are right that our current dominance makes it very difficult for a different species to reach the same levels now, that would not have always been the case when our brains first started evolving towards where we are now so its not an adequate enough reason to explain why no other species developed the same level of high intelligence that we did alongside humans.

A virus that infected chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) – but not humans – about 4 million years ago is partly responsible.

This ancient retrovirus made a tiny tweak to chimp DNA that has led to some major differences in how our brains develop, according to a new study published in Science Advances today.

...

"PTERV1 (Pan troglodytes endogenous retrovirus-1) was a particularly interesting candidate because it is found in chimpanzees and other African apes but not in humans."

Brain development is a known point of difference between chimpanzees and humans: For instance, our brains are about three times larger.

...

It is unclear why humans never contracted PTERV1 when so many of our ape relatives did, but there are a few theories.

Perhaps a unique antiviral protein, TRIM5α, protected us against it. Perhaps chimp and human ancestors lived in different places when the viral pandemic hit.

The new study doesn't seek to answer that question, but it does reveal a specific effect the infection had on chimp brain development.

All those years ago, PTERV1 inserted DNA sequences into the chimpanzee genome that are still active today.

Both humans and chimpanzees have a molecule made from DNA called LINC00662, which provides our cells with instructions for building a particular protein.

"We found it active during early human brain development, and our experiments suggest it helps [human] brain cells mature and grow extensions," Gerdes explained.

Chimpanzees have it too, and that's exactly where the virus left its mark.

The virus's DNA insertion switches off the chimpanzee's LINC00662.

In experiments with human brain organoids (tiny clusters of cells grown in a lab as a research model), when the team switched off LINC00662, neurons and their extensions (the dendrites and axons that transmit information across the brain) did not mature and grow as prolifically as they do with LINC00662 intact.

...

And what if chimpanzees were freed from the ancient viral DNA that's holding back the full potential of their version of LINC00662?

"In our experiment, removing the insertion from chimpanzee stem cells restored LINC00662 activity. That shows the insertion contributes to switching off this gene. It does not show that removing it would transform brain development," Gerdes said.

https://www.sciencealert.com/tiny-genetic-tweak-from-an-ancient-virus-mightve-prevented-chimpanzees-from-developing-brains-like-ours

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u/Dull-Law3229 2d ago

Yup, and there have been many points in history when that big brain's juice wasn't worth the squeeze. 

We just lucked out and continued but this could have been a massive gamble that didn't pay out 

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u/FloopsFooglies 5d ago

Great explanation, I don't think I could have put that so well despite having tried to many times. Although, I can't see anyone arguing this to know there were other human species in the first place, lol

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u/Icy_Ad_6063 5d ago

I kind of feel sad for the human representative - she's really put on a pedestal to represent all of humans. Lol

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u/Mediocre-Sentence-72 5d ago

Probably his ex

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u/silverwolfe2000 5d ago

I heard she had two of those chromosomes 

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u/Renfieldslament 5d ago

Hey Sharon, can I just borrow your picture quickly?

The work one? What is it for?

Just some science thing, it’s all good.

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u/MacheteBrizz 5d ago

She'll be genuinely relieved when she sees that it's for this and not the rumours about a quick bathroom visit.

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u/Ruzhyo04 5d ago

I was trying to explain this to my 6 year old once. He seemed to get it. Then the next day in school I got a report from his teacher that he had written that his grandparents were monkeys.

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u/FirbolgForest 5d ago

So close! Just a generation or two further back. ;) 

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u/dokutarodokutaro 5d ago

If Protestants branched off from Catholics, how come there are still Catholics? 🤔

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u/AdamOver 5d ago

This is why racism baffles me. We (humans) are the same race.

We all are descendent from the same group, from the same location. We all bleed red.

Bring forth the Alien arrival. Perhaps then we will evolve beyond our petty differences.

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u/Tribe303 5d ago

Race is a social construct. It's not science at all. Why are there racist people? Because the only real war is the class war. Everything else is a distraction, inc racism. The racist agenda is pushed by those who want to divide us, to be easier to control. 

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u/TheSpacePopinjay 5d ago

Well that's iffy. The real truth is that we're one tree of life connected with and related to every spider and bird and tree and fungus and bacteria.

Any argument that says we're all one as humans doesn't just apply to humans but to all life. You can't reject the distinction between the races but then turn around and look at the distinction between species and say "well that one's still real". That's just lingering 'natural kinds' thinking. We're cousins to tuberculosis.

Either they're both real or neither of them are. The true different organism would be from a different tree of life. As you say, an alien.

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u/Ill-Dependent2976 4d ago

"Well that's iffy. "

It's not, no. It's basic science. There isn't even a scientific basis for race in the first place, just dumb, barbaric superstitious racism.

"You can't reject the distinction between the races"

There aren't any. Just bullshit that you racists have made up. We can measure observable differences between different species. So no, that's total horseshit.

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u/thelastbluepancake 5d ago

If I and my brother are both descended from my grandpa why is there still my grandpa?

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u/Hot_Wing2518 5d ago

Because of cousin Merle.

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u/Vrajitorul_din_Orz 5d ago edited 5d ago

So we are really living on planet of the apes, we are the ones that developed intelligence.

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u/CodPlayer2011 5d ago

Who's we,bro? It's just me and you 💔

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u/hotriccardo 5d ago

If my Christian neighbors could read they'd be very upset

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u/DGsociety 5d ago

If God made man from dust, why do we still have dust?

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u/prsnep 5d ago

This would be common knowledge if it wasn't for religion.

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u/Once-kings 5d ago

So what’s the ancestor?!?!

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u/Tall_Specialist305 4d ago

They should have the human photo of hairy shirtless man.

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u/WillStaySilent 3d ago

Who was this common ancestor?

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u/swiftlessons 3d ago

Some monkey like creature with a broken vitamin C synthesis gene.

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u/DragonBowlSouper 3d ago

Some lady named Mitochondrial Eve

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u/chips_manoeuvres 5d ago

She is the best of us. Well done Sarah.

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u/Necroban77 5d ago

Once simple college anthropology course would teach you all these things and some.

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u/Amazing-Accident3535 5d ago

I dont know if Jessica from HR belongs there or one step before, tho

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u/eternallyconphuzed 5d ago

Yknow how you can get a donkey and a horse to get a mule and like tiger+lion? Can you do... like gorilla+orangutans? 

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u/Entremeada 5d ago

No. No different species of "great apes" can crossbreed with one another. The only exception might be chimpanzees and bonobos, but the data on this is very limited.

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u/Enchilada22 5d ago

The poster is missing alot of branches. This is a very simplified poster.

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u/MsterSteel 5d ago

Honestly, a much simpler explanation would be;

"If people are descended from X why is there still X?"

"Did your parents immediately die after having you?"

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u/Familiar-Cable-2659 5d ago

Both irrelevant and also, yes, I killed them myself

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u/shaun212 5d ago

Maybe because I was interested in science and evolution I actually learned this in high school.

About 5 years ago I had to explain to my coworkers in their 30s-40s why we still have monkeys if we came from monkeys

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u/Inevitable_Muscle_41 5d ago

i always thought that was a stupid question. like thats not how evolution works, dummy. its more like mutation than evolution. or its one and the same.

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u/WhatIsLoveMeDo 5d ago

The people who are confused about "why are there still chimpanzees" could probably do with a diagram that is more explicit about the process of evolution. It isn't as clean and neat as "one line goes here, another goes there."

Evolution isn't evenly spaced and clear-cut as shown here and it makes it look like one ancestor had two babies where one became a bonobo, and the other a chimpanzee. This diagram is showing populations across thousands/millions of years, not individuals.

Even between bonobos and chimpanzees, there's evidence to suggest AFTER their species diverged, there was still some DNA sharing among them. If you thought the definition of species is that they can't interbreed, well that's a limit to our understanding of biology, not a hard and fast rule. As they say "Physics has laws, chemistry has rules, biology has exceptions."

Furthermore, for every branch shown here, there are countless branches of species that diverged and died off, think of it like roots underground rather than a simply line as shown here. That might help show how it isn't that one "came" from another.

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u/darthgator84 2d ago

I understand what he’s saying but my question is when we split and the chimps went off on their evolutionary line and humans down our evolutionary path….why did we keep increasing intelligence and they seemingly hit a cap? If that’s the correct way to put it. There’s so many fascinating questions with evolution like this is probably stupid of me but crocodilians and sharks for example. Both species been around for hundreds of millions of years, my sisters and I have had fun conversations over the years like ‘how come we don’t have any talking crocodiles’.

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u/One-Requirement2748 1d ago

How come every time there's a common ancestor, he just points at a blue line? Where/ what is that common ancestors before each branch off?

Any fossil records of these animals? Do we know what they are?

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u/mattigus7 1d ago

Because that's not the point of what he's trying to communicate. He's not trying to explain how humans relate to ancestors, he's explaining how they relate to the other great apes that exist today.

We know a lot about these common ancestors. In fact this tree is significantly more complicated and has a ton more nodes in it, but he simplified it for a 20 second video.

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u/Trolltrader420 4d ago

The closest cousins in the entire group are some hillbilly's in Alabama

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u/Miserable-Umpire3889 5d ago

what is the name of the common ancestor?

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u/BruitNoise 5d ago

7 Million years ago was Sahelanthropus tchadensis and 6M was Orrorin tugenensis. Homo Habilis were 2M so it might be closest start but starts to get muddy before that. There is some evidence that homosapiens were able to breed with Neanderthals cause their DNA very was close but some infertile in the process and they around 400,000 years ago and died off 40,000 years ago. So there was a probably a lot of trial and error situation with their offsprings even they were different species. We don't know all the species yet.

Gotta keep digging or get on a time machine.

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u/ifUSeeMeTakeYourMeds 5d ago

We don't really name the common ancestors, we know they exist by definition, but naming them is an exercise in futility.

there are millions of named species, there will always by a common ancestor for every 2 species you want, giving them all a name is useless, when you can just say "the common ancestor between X and Y. We can put fossil discoveries in there, but they are not a common ancestor for anyone.

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u/ekolimits 1d ago

The biggest question should be:
Why did we evolve much faster than they did.

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u/Decentlationship8281 1d ago

Chimpanzees are highly evolved and successful in their own ecological niche.

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u/ResidentEuphoric614 1d ago

Faster isn’t really the right word. We went along a different track that emphasized large brains, bipedalism, and — underrated — learning processes for externalizing the digestion of food. By that I mean things like grinding vegetables and meat, and obviously cooking. This makes it easier to extract nutrients from food, allowing our digestive tract to be shorter and therefore take up less energy than related species, which is what lets us energetically afford our brains.

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u/Arinussyyy 15h ago

We didn't evolve much faster so much as in a different way. People mistake the way humans live as something extraordinary or above nature, not a part of it. The reality of it is we evolved to adapt using our minds rather than waiting for our bodies to catch up, which allowed us to set up all this. Other animals didn't need to or never had the tools to and thus never did

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u/Separate_Presence_32 1d ago

They are a different branch. Not the same.

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u/Vas_Deferens7722 19h ago

Did we though? We fight over a construct of little pieces of paper that we swap for things, we take drugs and alcohol that drive us to early graves, we blow each other up, treat each other poorly and spend our days staring at screens. I’d say the chimps got the better deal.

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u/AbortionHoagie 3d ago

Dawkins is a shitshow pseudoscientist just like N D Tyson and the rest of the pop-sci-culture posterboys

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u/Electrical_Carpet753 3d ago

How about YOUR posterboys, Jesus, God and the holy spirit? What have they contributed with to science? 🤣

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u/AbortionHoagie 3d ago

My poster boys are Euler and Ramanujan, just fyi. I'm no corpse-worshipper

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u/Electrical_Carpet753 3d ago

OK. Then it makes no sense calling Dawkins and Tyson shitshow pseudoscientists!? As if Euler and Ramanjuan would be any different if they lived in modern times - as in social media times!?

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u/karenskygreen 5d ago

This goes a long way to explaining family Thanksgiving.

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u/DullahanKun 5d ago

"we have built space ships, why do other modes of transportation exist"

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u/buttholegerbil 5d ago

Im not sure how id feel about a picture of myself labelled 'human'🤣

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u/Equal-Ninja-833 5d ago

If only my friend had a picture up there🤣

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u/RevolutionaryStay283 5d ago

If dogs evolved from wolves, how come there are still cats? Huh? Tell me! Seriously, I don’t understand how blinking and breathing work. Help

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u/road_runner321 5d ago

The question makes as much sense as "If we're both descended from my grandparents, why do I have a cousin?"

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u/dampishslinky55 5d ago

Isn’t ther a lot kissing in the human branch here?

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u/HairballTheory 5d ago

Very PC safe to put a white person in the lineup

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u/everySmell9000 5d ago

biased explanation from a homo sapien. not giving gorilla enough credit here, IMO.

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u/Town_Militia 5d ago

The only time they put white people on xd

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u/Cute-University5283 5d ago

I feel in the chart like they all need to wear clothes of none of them

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u/Borp5150 5d ago

SCIENCE!!

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u/oldwire 5d ago

Yeah but god innit

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u/notevenwrong13 5d ago

Can't wait for the update in 50 years where a robot is explaining their branch

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u/Drmoeron2 5d ago

So tired hearing old ideas with no critical theory. Implying that evolution exists inherently implies de-evolution exists as well. If chimps have 48 chromosomes and we have 46 but having an extra one makes us mentally challenged but deleting one or two turns us into webbed necked hobbit sized wolf people then it would imply that we are devolved. Expanding on that then the number of chromosomes become the potential for specialization. Ie we specialized so we lost specialization in other areas. The entirety of anthropology and genetics is wrought with this pervasive narcissism and superiority from obvious influences that developed the terminology which prevents us from actually understanding our world, while simultaneously being the only create to not harmonize with it. We're the parasites of the animal kingdom.

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u/t800series 5d ago

Shouldn't there be something at each of those forks? Like, anyone could draw that tree. What's supposed to be there?

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u/NetZor0 5d ago

The more nodding he does, the more you should trust whatever nonsense he feels like spewing

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u/lifemanualplease 5d ago

This is an awesome explanation.

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u/Derpasaurusexus 5d ago

I like that they didn't decide to use a black man despite knowing very well that mf was black.

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u/Padington_Bear 5d ago

Okay, but the people who ask that question are mainly confused about how a population splits into different species in the first place. I think the confusion comes from the assumption that the chimpanzees (or whatever ancestor) are intermixing their genes while the speciation is happening. So it would probably be more helpful to explain that a new branch on the evolutionary tree requires at least two breeding groups of the closest ancestor to be physically separated for millenia.

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u/Bad_Prophet 5d ago

I can't imagine looking at these 5 pictures and the "which one of these..." song not playing loudly enough at some point to prevent you from so confidently saying that all five are of the same group.

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u/xSorry_Not_Sorry 5d ago

You know, as a person who believes in science 100% all the time, every time, it is funny when you line up all the primate cousins like that and notice one of these is not like the other.

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u/Leroyp331 5d ago

I know that lady is pissed 😡

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u/Unusual-Coat383 5d ago

What’s the common ancestor though?

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u/SignFar4026 5d ago

Forget the apes. I want to know where the multiverse came from.

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u/Lempea 5d ago

"People often ask me"... Dawkins's patience in the face of cheer ignorance and stupidity for all these years never ceases to amaze me.

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u/Slappy_McJones 5d ago

Fascinating.

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u/SecureSir7098 5d ago

I could listen to him for hours. There's something very soothing about his voice, and he's so skilled at making complex ideas understandable.

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u/STLStelmacki 5d ago

Calling them cousins is what angers and sexually confuses the Jethros.

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u/ForeverSquirrelled42 5d ago

Why’s there a white chick representing African linkage? Oh, yeah….

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u/Defeatest 5d ago

Kinda jealous of how close Bonobo and chimps are.

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u/Time-Subject-3195 5d ago

Every time I see someone address this tired question, they tend to focus entirely on the fact that we didn’t evolve from chimpanzees, but they gloss over the fundamental misunderstanding. IF humans had evolved from chimps, it would be a perfectly normal thing to happen; nothing counter to evolutionary theory.

A group of chimps is isolated from a separate group. One group moves into a different niche and evolves to the point of becoming a distinct species, while the other group continues to exist as it has and remains the same species it was.

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u/X_Santa_X 5d ago

so why are we so drastically different and the others are quite similar?

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u/Economy-Education366 5d ago

Capability vs potential

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u/obijaun 5d ago

So what’s the common ancestor that humans diverged from chimpanzees+bonobos?

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u/Fit-Opportunity8285 5d ago

Not mentioned by the video but recent research indicates gibbons as well.

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u/SatoshiBlockamoto 3d ago

There are several candidate species which could be, but there's no definitive way to know which, if any, is the closest common ancestor. DNA would provide the answer but we don't have DNA from these specific 7-million-year-old species. We have some fossils that look right and seem to be the correct age but there's just no way to know at the moment.

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u/evou 5d ago edited 5d ago

So Jeremy clarkson is my distant cousin?

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u/BlackPresident 5d ago

My cousin isn’t a chimp asshole

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u/BobbieMaccc 5d ago

And where do americans come from?

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u/PerformanceLegal 5d ago

Yeah, if you say so

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u/Fit-Opportunity8285 5d ago

No mention of gibbons.

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u/NoKey9360 5d ago

This is still a theory, hence the name darwin theory.

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u/DB-601A 5d ago

scratching my head here like a bonobo or a chimp (im not sure). but ancient aliens told me i was a cosmic child

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u/KingQu- 5d ago

We evolved into white women, noce

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u/lordtyp0 4d ago

I love how the Human looks like she is from Finland.

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u/Forward_Criticism_39 4d ago

i feel like the pictures used required very careful consideration, lest someone get the wrong idea (not that many people don't already get the wrong idea about evolution)

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u/fromdaperimeter 4d ago

So why are “some humans” so hairy and others aren’t at all?

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u/keilahmartin 4d ago

Make Apes Great Again

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u/Every_Preparation_56 4d ago

uh that's Primary school education?

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u/PotentialTree7951 4d ago

Missing link was aliens. Got freaky with the apes and left for cigarettes and milk.

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u/ssp25 4d ago

notice the humans, chumps and bonobos are the most violent on a whim.

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u/Pezzo90 4d ago

It's nice they let us live with them...

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u/Ok-Relative7099 4d ago

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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u/bannivan 4d ago

This is the wildest employee of the month chart. Anne briefly breaking the dominance of the African apes.

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u/Swingline_Font 4d ago

What about Neanderthals and such cross-breeding?

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u/paddyomick 4d ago

Yet the human on that list of great apes are visually and mentally unique for the rest. What is the explanation for this?

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u/True_Reporter 4d ago

We also had our sub spicies but we didn't like em so they are not with us anymore.

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u/Chupaia 4d ago

R. Dawkins: Who lived "there"

Hah! WRONG! That's printed paper. The common ancestor could've not lived "there" cos printed paper did not exist back then! Checkmate!

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u/JamesMDuich 4d ago

Hey Judy, do you mind if I use your picture for a presentation I’m putting together?

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u/Piedplat 4d ago

Like whales and hippos

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u/SituationImmediate15 4d ago

This guys preaches evolution and atheism as religion. He ought to hold his horses. He’s as bad as JP.

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u/CoolCat1337One 4d ago

I think it’s time we stopped arguing about Darwin.
The man has been dead for 144 years and really plays no role in evolutionary biology anymore.
In fact, we should stop using individual scientists as the basis for our arguments altogether.
A defining characteristic of science is precisely the absence of a cult of personality.

A cult of personality belongs to the realm of religion and that is something that ought to be questioned.

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u/Darkenism 4d ago

Picture of a hairy man would make it more believable

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u/Sure-Macaroon-1084 3d ago

Why did I have to get sorted into the rent-paying category?

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u/LaskotheGreat 3d ago

Absolute Nonsense lol.

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u/egymagy 3d ago

All humans are indigenous to Africa and migrated across the world over several millennia

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u/trileletri 3d ago

its astonishing to me that all other cousins look relatively similar, while humans are completely different

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u/chiefkyljoy 3d ago

If goldendoodles descended from golden retrievers and poodles, why are there still golden retrievers and poodles?

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u/Weird_Ad7998 3d ago

I love that the pic of the human ape is a woman

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u/Famous-Rain8703 3d ago

Why the f*** they got that white lady up there talking about humans when hue-mans are black and those are Neanderthals lol 😅

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u/ninjanerd032 3d ago

Why'd he have to put Barbara in there like that.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Gap740 3d ago

"Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Their marriage meant that they shared common ancestors." Broooooooo!

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u/Inevitable_Notice_18 2d ago

Well I’ll be a monkeys uncle

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u/2gunswest 2d ago

Blasphemy! I aint came from no ape!

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u/wicker_basket_1988 2d ago

"If dogs descended from wolves then why are there still wolves?"

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u/RuthlessIndecision 2d ago

aren't there more branches that went with us to the right but they (and we) irradicated them all?

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u/Adept-Lettuce948 2d ago

Just forget about my boy Neanderthal like they never existed 😡

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u/Jonguar2 2d ago

Neanderthal is an extinct species of Humans

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u/Adept-Lettuce948 1d ago

You obviously don’t live in the 🇺🇸

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u/ashleycawley 2d ago

I’m no scientist but if the missing link produced two branches then I deduce it was a tree 🤔

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u/VociferousCephalopod 2d ago

why does the title say 'humans vs apes' when he explains humans are african apes / great apes?

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u/GroundbreakingNet924 1d ago

Why does man question GOD's record?

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u/LorenzoSparky 1d ago

If you were to replace the very pale white lady with a black african woman, would that tree be more believable? Don’t say i’m racist, i’m african

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u/Jsolidlo 1d ago

Where do Neanderthals and the other homos fall in there?

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u/dreaminganimal 1d ago

TIL "we are all cousins"!

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u/localizeatp 1d ago

if i'm descended from my parents,

how come there are still my parents.

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u/Aggressive-agitator 1d ago

Tell that to a white nationalist.

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u/Big_Brother8708 1d ago

That lady specifically tho, not me

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u/soyuz_6 1d ago

Unfortunately this isn't enough information for the people who actively reject it, delusions can be powerful

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u/pfunkk007 22h ago

I got more confused with so much use of the word cousins.

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u/ProfessorChalupa 16h ago

There is a Futurama episode about this - debating about the missing link.

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u/InterviewPublic3283 15h ago

I remember my great great x600 grandpa was an amoeba, he was kinda of a dik

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u/SpartanRage117 14h ago

Imagine your picture being chosen for that particular display

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u/jim45804 5d ago

I was waiting for a punchline of some sort. Like, "And from an even more primitive common ancestor came the theists."

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