“If Evolution is True, Why Are There Still Monkeys?”
This “question” is often a mild source of frustration for me, which can, on occasion manifest into episodes of chronic rage and indiscriminate violence, but not entirely for the reasons you may imagine.
It’s not the complete lack of understanding in regards to common ancestry and evolution that gets my sacrificial goat; it’s the Incomprehensible levels of arrogance that the question alone indicates.
Now, this may come as a surprise to some, but I’m not actually a scientist. No, honestly.
I would consider myself someone with an average level of academic ability. This is why I find it useful to defer the shortcomings of my own knowledge to experts who endeavour to seek the truth, via credible and robust methods of observation, study and testing. I believe this makes it possible to consider myself informed. This to me seems a reasonable method of learning what…is.
I do think it’s important to have patience with people when such ignorance is a result of naivety or lack of education, but unfortunately, this question never takes the form of a sincere desire to learn the answer. It is void of all inquisitiveness. In fact, it’s not even intended as a question. It’s a smirking premature declaration of victory by the poser. They believe, in one act of intellectual superiority, they have destroyed Darwin and flipped scientific understanding on its head. That’s some feat. Bravo!
It’s this extraordinarily high regard for ones own intellect that I find mind-blowing, especially given the subject matter of the question. In fact, you don’t even need to understand the theory of evolution (which they don’t) to deduce that you must be mistaken in your questions premise, or at the least, short of a few key pieces of key information.
Let’s have a look at some things you must assume about yourself/knowledge to even put forward this question, or perhaps should have considered before asking it:
- YOU, believer of ancient texts have stumbled across a mammoth oversight which will change the global understanding of complex life within the developed world. Your expertise on this topic negates the wealth of information contained within the fossil record, later validated by contemporary biological methods and decades of scientific investigation. The research you undertook during your study is astounding, detailed and thorough, using complex language, not written in any way by Crayon.
- Your investigation is soon to be detailed in the game changing, scientific, peer-reviewed journal titled “Darwin Shmarwin – There’s still monkeys!”.
- Well done. YOU are smarter than an evolutionary biologist. Instead of wasting years of their life furthering understanding through critical analysis, all they needed to do was pick up the phone, and enlighten themselves in no more time than it takes for you to dribble the words “there still be monkeys!”
- Your years of casually ignoring facts, and employing the tried and tested method of taking your information “on faith” is obviously a more worthy process of discerning questions of this nature. Your ideas are evidently far too complex for the mere scientist to fathom by themselves. With all those books in your house, where will you find room on your shelf for that Nobel Prize? I wonder.
- The majority of the scientific community are undoubtedly engaged in mass conspiracy to deny the truth. In fact, they’re just making it up as they go along. You don’t even need to fact check evolution and discover if there is any truth in it, or if your question is a valid one. Why would you? There are still monkeys for gods sake! Check mate scientist! Their huge misunderstanding could have been so easily avoided if just one of those morons raised a hand during playtime (I assume scientist have play time) and used their big voice to say “Yes, all that does seem fairly spot on, but have you noticed there are still monkeys? ”
I wonder why that has never happened. It seems so obvious now you have mentioned it. What a glaring over-sight. How embarrassing. It’s as if the question isn’t valid or something.
Odd.
An honest and sincere iteration of this question would be “A minimum of rational thought has led me to conclude I have misunderstood the theory of evolution, as I am not sure why there are still monkeys, yet the experts, globally accept we evolved. What am I missing?”
You’d still be ignorant, but not wilfully, and far less of a gigantic clot.
GS
Monkeys continue to exploit a niche that humans, until recently, could not.
Hence: Monkeys exist.
It is becoming clear that modern Humans also exploited their resources to the detriment of Neanderthals in the last 30,000 years.
Hence: Neanderthals died.
I’m not a scientist, but without getting money for it, as close as it gets!
It seems that I was wrong about the Neanderthal theory:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/07/new-study-suggests-humans-not-climate-killed-off-neanderthals
But regarding the common ancestry of primates and hominids, the DNA research seems to suggest that primates are more complex in structure, yet hominids were divergent at a more recent departure (100,000 YA to 3.6 MYA)
Primate Project:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_genome_project
And in related, recent news:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7388/full/nature10842.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20120308
(With thanks to WikiPedia and Nature for public access to this information.)
Oh, so where is the solid evidence that humans came from monkeys?
There isn’t any. We DIDN’T come from monkeys. Thank you for proving the religious ignorance on this subject and validating my entire article, which you clearly did not read or understand.
Beautifully done. Thank you.
Reblogged this on myndsea and commented:
Articulate, insightful, & artistic in logic,
I highly respect the work done here.
Please make sure to follow @GSpellchecker on Twitter.
Pingback: More fun and games with Challenge My Church « @Gspellchecker's Blog
Why are there still monkeys? That’s easy. So they can spread the word of God. Duh.
Actually, sheep spread the word of god…
I think the easiest way of thinking about this is that we didn’t evolve from Apes, but alongside them. We share a common ancestor that we both evolved from. It’s also worth pointing out that Apes, and not Monkeys, are our closest relatives.
We are Apes, our closest relatives being, a fellow Ape, the Chimp.
Hysterical! I almost peed.
Fantastic GSpellchecker. Thanks for taking the time to write this. I look forward to the next one.
Excellent blog! And I’m stealing that pic for the next time I see that question!
Awesome. Too bad those asking the dumb question ain’t gonna read it…
Brilliant!
“If we came from our parents, why do we still have parents?”
I also like an explanation (I don’t remember where I read it) that easily demonstrates the ancestral relationship between us and chimpanzees (in that we share a common ancestor)
You and you cousin both came from your grandmother. You don’t have the same parents but you share a common ancestor.
It doesn’t get any easier than that eh?
What pisses me off is how I get pitied because I’m an atheist – “shame, poor chap, hasn’t seen the light…”