Joel Kontinen
Biology has taken a non-Darwinian turn. Now, they are asking whether all primates have evolved into humans. This is a case of predestination against which some scientist say we should refrain from.
Even Darwinian just so stories are full of goal-orientation and teleology.
It seems that the problems evolution is facing are not about to disappear anytime soon.
As a story in live science says,
"While we were migrating around the globe, inventing agriculture and visiting the moon, chimpanzees — our closest living relatives — stayed in the trees, where they ate fruit and hunted monkeys.
Modern chimps have been around for longer than modern humans have (less than 1 million years compared to 300,000 for Homo sapiens, according to the most recent estimates), but we've been on separate evolutionary paths for 6 million or 7 million years. If we think of chimps as our cousins, our last common ancestor is like a great, great grandmother with only two living descendants."
Then comes the result:
"The reason other primates aren't evolving into humans is that they're doing just fine," Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. All primates alive today, including mountain gorillas in Uganda, howler monkeys in the Americas, and lemurs in Madagascar, have proven that they can thrive in their natural habitats."
The article also takes about ants, who have excel in things we don’t. And they are successful. And it takes on the message of why our primates left the trees. however, it speaks of goal-orientation and predestination!
Source:
Currin, Grant. 2019, Why Haven't All Primates Evolved into Humans? Live Science (14 July).
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