Proteins, Apes & Us (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 08, 2012, 15:32 (4590 days ago) @ David Turell

Aaron Filler has a theory that modern apes are descended from human ancestors.-DAVID: Apes did not descend from humans like us [...] there was a dedicated 'human line' that was very much an ape-like creature 20 million years ago.-This is also your justification for regarding humans as God's chosen species. If you believe in evolution as opposed to God's separate creation, chimps also have a dedicated line, and strictly speaking EVERY species has a dedicated line! Because theoretically EVERY species must have a line back to Darwin's "few forms or one".
 
I have found a website with a few short extracts from Filler's book, so we can examine the logic for ourselves: www.uprightape.net. Here are three quotes from a single chapter:-"First there was one. Now there are four upright bipedal species of apes before the chimp-human split."
 
"Paleoanthropology as a field has not yet come to grips with the revolutionary implications. The first "human" was probably Morotopithecus and probably lived 21 million years ago. The existing apes have a human ancestor."-"For fifty years we have defined the first humans by the acquisition of upright bipedal posture in creatures like Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) who had brains like other apes. However, it now appears that based on this definition human history must reach back to the Miocene of 21 million years ago."-Human history must reach back like every other history to the earliest forms of life. If bipedalism has been the criterion for 50 years, maybe it's time we changed the criterion in view of the confusion it seems to cause. Within just a few lines Filler himself refers to the upright bipedal species as apes, then as "human", and then as human, which gives him his sensational, "revolutionary" conclusion. May I suggest that what he has shown is that both humans and existing apes have various species of apes as their ancestors (hardly revolutionary, as it = Darwinism, which you acknowledge). Filler's theory then depends partly on language ... i.e. whether we call the earlier bipedal species apes (which he does) or humans (which he does) or hominins (your humans that are not like us). -However, David, you say: "We can only go by the fossils we find." Since the fossil record is so sparse, do we really know what lines followed what lines? How can anyone say for sure that modern gorillas and chimps are descended from any of those four bipedal species of apes, which were all presumably contemporary with other species of four-legged apes, which themselves also presumably continued to evolve into new species? When I was young, the in vogue expression was "the missing link". It seems to me, as Tony has indicated, that there are countless missing links in every theory. Filler's "revolutionary" one makes less and less sense the more I look at it, but then so does everything else in this sweet mystery of life.