Evolving apes.

I quite think so yes. There is strong evidence that human interaction and healthy environments have led some great apes (especially 'Bonobo's' or Pygmy chimpanzees) to develope basic language skills (using touch-screens for example) including basic syntax, abilitiy to generalise words to other situations and negative statements (e.g. I do not want a bannana). The best example is the research by Savage-Runbaurg et al on Pygmy chimpanzees.
Remember that evolution is more than JUST genetic, it's also social and mental or 'memetic' to use Dawkin's term. So if we can introduce complex language into great apes I do believe they could evolve similar creativity, imagination, intellect and even moral sentiments to humans.

And yes I believe we can consciously control our own evolution: for example the Enlighment thinkers realised that human society and intelect could evolve to the 'next stage' as it were if we learnt how to rationally examine all our believes and especially to dispose of the authority of religious myths/church doctrine.
Further, genetic enginereers may one day be used to cure genetically inherited illnesses.
Nature works by natural selection... but WE can artifically/consciously select the best ideas and toss out the bad.

I doubt it - it simply doesn't happen enough (which might take dozens or hundreds of generations) to spawn any real change. Necessity (survival's necessity, that is) can - I believe - invoke change over timem but touch-screen experiments aren't requisite to their survival.

Something else to think about; one of the distinguishing intelligence behaviors anthropology uses, is the extent to which any life form uses "tools". Various primates do this (one good example I recall seeing is where chimpanzees will often find a stick/stem, bend it at the top, wet it with their tongues, then shove it down a termite mound hole to snag a few critters for a snack - being out of sight (conceptualization) and the teaching that goes on (chimp to chimp) on this method is noteworthy to say the least). Keeping this in mind, and knowing that all current non-human primates are on a separate evolutionary branch, it becomes highly likely that they may simply not have the ability to evolve the kind of intelligence you suggest.

... I don't know, just seems likely to be the case to me

Thanks

Biological evolution occurs over very large time-frames from a human perspective - many thousands of years.

There are ideas floating around of 'conscious evolution' - h. sapiens now playing a part in his/her own evolution. There are also the ideas of 'evolving consciousness' and 'evolutionary enlightenment'. Very interesting ideas too, but different in many ways from the biological theory of evolution. It is a case where the word 'evolution' has a much broader meaning that that given by 'the theory of evolution of species'.

The taught apes express themselves by connecting separate words, "such as apple eat" not a stream of logical words.

Why has evolution seemed to have stopped millions of years ago for the great apes, and their human cousins Homo Sapient stopped evolving some 100 thousand years ago?

I don't think there is an answer to that question. In fact there are no answers to a lot of questions about evolution, other than, 'this is because it promoted survival of the species'. Survival is the sine qua non of evolutionary theory. But then, for a human, there is much more to living than surviving.

Many claim that we were engineered by the selfish gods , aliens, because of our enormous leap in evolutionary terms. Is it anymore ludicrous than the belief in genesis ?

Maybe XRIS We might just be a small ant farm to some billions more advanced civilization that ours

But the problem of infinite regression remains, where does the "buck stop"

How about with god?

What's more likely is that apes subjected to a program of education reach a certain potential denied to them in the wild (though conversely, I'm sure captive chimps are stunted in some was that their wild equivalents are not).

This means much the same as what would be observed in two children - one given a comprehensive modern education and the other raised in a rainforest tribe with a 'stone-age' society - of course the former is more likely to be able to operate a computer or drive a car - but that's not because he or she is more 'evolved' than the the other child, they're just given better opportunities to understand technology (conversely - they may well be at a disadvantage if left to survive in the wild).

If a breeding program exists that rewards the apes who learn faster by allowing them to breed with other smart apes we may see an evolution in action - though I'm not sure about the existence of such a trial. It would certainly be a long-term process.

Aside from apes our actions have led to evolutions multiple times - either deliberately in the case of domesticated animals or selectively bred food crops, or incidently as in the case of nylon-eating bacteria or Italian wall lizards.

However, each organism in any given ecosystem will exert evolutionary pressure on its neighbours by mere fact of their presence really. Human evolution has been fundamentally affected by things like the microrganisms that caused the black death, or the spirochetes that cause malaria, or the cellulose in the plants we eat, animals that predate on us, primal fears of poisonous or disease carrying animals, etc....

Can you imagine the aliens breeding us like dogs? In the many disgusting 'breeds' we have engineered.
There would be the long nosed human, the human with the longest noses make the best pets. Toy humans, long limbed humans webbed human class etc. With each breeds speciality. Made to do tricks and run around in circles, wait a minute dont we already do this ourselves?
They have a crufts for humans on their world:)

---------- Post added 02-14-2010 at 10:46 PM ----------

We were never really apes.

We still are. Nothing seperates us from them in terms of taxonomy.

We still never really are.

If you want to go back to anything, go all the way 'back', we are trees, we are the mud,
all comes and goes to and from the same thing.
We all start as the same thing.
We all end as the same thing.

"We are not apes!! we are made in the mental likeness of the Almighty. Out bodies might be similar to apes but our consciousness or minds are godlike

Maybe - but that doesn't preclude us from being - catagorically speaking - apes.

There's nothing about the scientific definition of what an ape is that does not equally apply to us and there's less seperating us from chimps in terms of genetics than there is seperating chimps from orang outans or gibbons.

As for trees - that's not the case at all. Trees are relative newcomers to the scene compared with the common ancestor of trees and humans. The lineage split, and some of the microrganisms at that time gave rise to trees, whilst others gave rise to animals.

In familial terms they are distant cousins - not ancestors.

As for mud - that's a simple strawman really. Clay is thought to have been an important catalyst in terms of abiogenesis - but the ingredients of supposed proto-life are phospholipid bilayers and polynucleotide chains.

That's not mere "mud". Mundane chemicals - yes. Mud - no.

---------- Post added 02-15-2010 at 05:34 AM ----------


Of course there's nothing to actually show this, and some unfortunate humans do exist with mental faculties that aren't as healthy or versatile as, say, a bonobo's. Our conception of having godlike minds is just human arrogance really, and rather cruelly excludes those who have damaged minds from being truely 'human'.

Even so - mental capacity isn't a card you can wave to escape from your taxonomic group. Are animals more 'godlike' than plants in general? Are dolphins more 'godlike' than sea cucumbers?

Here's an argument I like that helps clarify things:

Now no one argues whether we're vertebrates or placental mammals, even though that also means we're animals. The fact that we're apes can now be verified just as easily. For a while, most people thought the word, "ape" referred only to extant non-human pongids also known as "great apes". There was no consideration given to "lesser" apes, nor to any of the many ancient apes we kept finding fossils for. Mainstream science sources are just now starting to realize that the word, 'ape' means a lot more than just chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, and that it includes a few extinct hominids that are more humanoid than any of these.



So there was a problem with our old method of classification, and it had to be fixed. Over the last two hundred and fifty years, we've kept patching up the original seven-layer system by adding a suborder, infraorder, superfamily, subgenus, and so on -'til we can't even tell how to rank the labels anymore. That's when we figured out that there are no ranks! So we dropped the labels and found a new system, one that isn't so arbitrary. See, the problem with Linnaean taxonomy is that some of it is subjective. It's usually based on morphological similarity, and sometimes on opinion, and loathsome opinions at that. There's often no way to prove whether Linnaean classification was even correct because he didn't rely on the rigid sort of rules that phylogenetics does.



We used to say that men didn't evolve from apes, but that men and apes shared a common ancestor. Now we have a better understanding of what an ape is, and that our common ancestor actually would have been classified as such, and so should we be.

Imagine you get to interview the Knight-Industries-Two-Thousand from the TV show, Knightrider, and you tell it you've never had a conversation with a car before. But KITT argues that he is not a car, because he's smarter and generally better than any car, because mere cars can't talk like he can. Of course you know that even a sentient automobile is still an automobile. So if you can't determine a rigid definition of exactly what that is, perhaps you could still prove the point if KITT will admit that being manufactured as a General Motors Pontiac Firebird Trans Am means it can only be a car. People deny their monkeyhood for the same reason, and that excuse can be refuted in the same way.



Phenotypical taxonomy is character-based, an in-depth analysis of every morphological, developmental, genetic or physiological trait. Systematic classification surpasses this by comparing these collectives to determine derived synapomorphies indicating a nested phylogeny -and that determines the clade! Because phylogenetic hierarchy is the only consistent criteria for classifying diverse forms stemming from an evolutionary lineage, and that evidently is where we came from.


From this source:
YouTube - Turns out we DID come from monkeys!

Why should we have come from monkeys, maybe they evolved from us, maybe they are just recessive humans maybe they devolved from humans and not the other was around???

Maybe.

Now, scientifically speaking, how would you begin to verify that?

Perhaps you could turn to the fossil record - if monkeys are devolved from us you'd expect to see the oldest human remains at earlier periods than the oldest monkey remains - stands to reason.

Unfortunately for this hypothesis the opposite is true.

Perhaps the phylogenetic tree will contradict the fossil record - allowing us to theorise that the story it tells must be wide from the mark?

Unfortunately the phylogenetic tree backs the fossil record up pretty comprehensively - and even allows for speculative filling of many gaps.

The taxonomic tree?

It fits neatly on the phylogenetic one.

Well, perhaps geographical distribution might help? If simians came from us you'd expect the simians similar to us to be found in lots of habitats, whilst more distant monkey types would be found in the places they recently evolved in.

Unfortunately with a few exceptions the opposite seems to be true. Humans have conquered the world thanks to tool use, but most other homnids seem to be confined to Africa, Catarrhines to the old world (with the exception of human-built zoos) but primates in general all over the place.

Perhaps some common sense musing on the theory of evolution will help the hypothesis and show this data to be out of whack? If monkeys derived from us it would be pretty likely that we'd see some forms of life emerge that could compete with us on our own terms - squeeze us out of our niche - throw up some new paradigm of tool use or sapience.

Unfortunately the opposite is true, in all regards your proposed basal form (us) seems to be new paradigm that squeezes it's competitors up to (and over) the edge of extinction.

Why?

Because we're the currently successful newcomers.

Yes, learned behaviours can readily effect Evolution as it is sometimes defined.
Teach a chimp how to use an efficient weapon and he could do quite a lot of selecting on other chimps or other species.

Nevertheless my beloved ones are not sophisticated monkeys, when I look into their eyes I don't see an ape looking back at me I see the soul of a higher being created to exist forever

What do you see when you look into the eyes of an orang?

I see an animal, after god created man he breathed life into him and HE BECAME A LIVING SOUL, I accept that as true not the nonsense that we arose from lower order apes and hominids