If evolution is soooo true, how come primates dont continue evolving into humans? or at least get smarter?

Question

Ok, instead of "get smarter" i guess i mean: why didnt all primates evolve into humans? and why dont they continue to? why did they stop?

Answer 1

evolution is a process that takes a very long time to occur. at even that being said, very small changes occur along the way. most of the species currently on earth aren't that old on a geological timeline.

Answer 2

Why didn't the dinosaurs live? Why did all the 99% of plants and animals that have ever existed NOT seen today???

Why do we see ONLY the most primative things like bacteria in the oldest rocks as fossils and why do we see the most "complex" plants and animals today?? Why did the angiosperm plants not exist at a certain time, while ferns were the dominant plant (the ones that gave us coal today)?

What you don;t understand is that changes that occur MAY be good, MAY be bad or MAY have no effect at all on anything......if a feature is successful, like standing on 2 legs, that thing will produce lots of offspring which passes that feature onto offspring that will SLOWLY become more common.  

Apes did not look as they did 10 million years ago when the last common ancestor to them and us was probably around. They too look different, they too have evolved.

Primates are pretty smart in comparison to other animals, but our brain is pretty advanced and has developed parts of the brain allowing us to speak...our posture (as a result of bipedalism) has allowed the laranyx to open up and allow sounds to be made.  the frontal part of our brain allows us more imagination than other animals too

The chances of any ape of today having developing these features are next to none! We were lucky that our ancestors were able to walk on 2 legs....which then led onto brain devlopment.....

Did you know how many different "creatures" that walked on 2 legs are known today??? 20 species and counting!!! Some lived at the same time as others, like early humans and the closely related, but NOT ancestors, neaderthals!! They co-existed for 30,000years.....a long time by our standards!

Answer 3

Why are there tigers, lions, cheetahs, cougars, and housecats?  Why don't they just all become lions?  Haha evolution is so dumb!! *giggle*

Why are there white sharks, and tiger and sand and nurse and whale sharks *giggle* can't they just get together and figure out that one species is so much.. cooler?!?

*giggle giggle*  *wets self*  *giggle.....*

Answer 4

Other animals are still evolving. However, for some animals, there is not sufficient pressure from the environment to do so, though the pressures we humans place on these animals is an evolutionary force, the pace of change in evolution is far far slower than the pace of human population growth and technology.

Answer 5

The biological diversity of planet Earth is not a ladder of progress. Simpler forms of life are not simply earlier versions of the more complicated ones. Similarly, apes are not earlier versions of humans. You would no more expect a chimp to eveolve into a human than you would a horseshoe crab. Evolution says that humans evolved from different life forms. It also says that apes evolved from different life forms. It also says that evolution happened simultaneously. Humans did not come from apes, they split off from them when selective pressures acted differently on different populations of an earlier species. Some of them adapted one way, some other ways. This is how evolution describes things.

Evolution does not say people come from primates. Where'd you hear that?

EDIT: I see that by your additional comments, you're not even bothering to notice the difference between primates and non-primates. If you can't even commit that much attention to the question, then you clearly don't want an answer.

Answer 6

Who says they are not??? Humans as a species developed over billions of years. Somewhere our chromosones and genes took a right turn down the proper path, and we developed into modern day humans. Primates have each taken their own path, adapting where needed. This does not mean they have stopped adapting currently. It just means the whole process does not occur over night and another billion years from now, who's to say Dogs won't be the dominant creature and man extinct?

Answer 7

Your question is that which is lame.

Answer 8

How can you tell that they are not?  Monkeys have been observed using primitive tools.  Besides, the evolutionary process takes many thousands of years as species struggle to adapt to changing conditions.  I doubt you will live long enough to witness a quantum leap in evolution.

On the other hand, if evolution has no basis, why would the creator give us teeth (wisdom) that our jaws can no longer accommodate because dietary changes that have occurred over the last several thousand years?  So he could one day create dentists?  Why give an appendix that has become stunted and atrophied because it no longer serves a purpose in the digestive process?  So he could create doctors to surgically remove them when they become infected?

Answer 9

Adding onto the response from acool816, I would question whether inelligence is the only way to adapt to an environment.  The brain provides great evolutionary benefits, but it also proves to be very costly as well.  For example, it takes a lot of energy to run a brain.  That means needing to take in more resources for food.  Perhaps evolutionary history has shown that it is more adaptive for apes to have better bodies to swing from tree to tree, or to be strong enough to hunt other prey, etc.

Answer 10

God did the creating, no matter how it happened.

Answer 11

Evolution is a process that takes a huuuuge span of time.  Just because you don't notice it, or see it happening doesn't make it untrue... of course you know that... don't you.

Answer 12

I think we have proved that throughout our time and the time that we have been monitoring primates that they are getting more intellegent. We can teach an ape how to use sign language, right? Isnt that more than they could do 100 years ago? It will take more than our life time to see if they are going to evolve even further.

Answer 13

maybe you should wait until puberty and further brain development before you start mocking things you don't understand.

and to the answer directly above: humans are apes, apes are apes. The 4 great apes consist of homo, pan, pongo and gorilla. we're all primates people...

Answer 14

Things don't just spawn for the h**l of it.

Evolution is nature's way of selecting the best organism for the present environment.  Which organism would survive better in an ocean:  a human or a flounder?

Think of evolution in the following manner....  some people are born with webbed toes.  It's a very rare occurrence, but it does happen.  Right now, in our current environment, webbed toes don't really help us in our survival.  However, what if we were in an ocean, and webbed toes helped us swim faster?  That might be just what we need to survive in that environment.  While the humans without webbed toes are at a disadvantage, they are more likely to die off.

So the people with webbed toes are more likely to reproduce, and over many, many years the population of humans with webbed toes is far greater than it was at the beginning.

That is evolution..  it does not happen from accident...  It's nature's way of selecting the best organisms for the present environment.

Answer 15

Visible evolution takes time (it took millions of years for humans to evolve from our apish ancestors, and I doubt that you have been watching that long), and requires environmental pressure for visible mutations to occur.  Absent such pressure, variants aren't usually enough better to preferably survive.  Evolution has been established science for a century, meaning that people use it because it gives correct answers, and is now a proven fact. (Proof details on request to anyone who provides an e-mail address.)

Answer 16

*sigh*  You can't educate the willfully ignorant.

I realize that you think you are being profound and brilliant.

However, you need to realize that anyone with half an education is laughing at your lack of knowledge.

Answer 17

SO BECAUSE YOU DON'T SEE CHANGE OR PERCEIVE CHANGE IN THE PRIMATE POPULATION, IN THE SMALL SPAN OF YOUR OWN LIFE, YOU ASSUME THAT THEY'RE NOT GETTING SMARTER. ARE YOU A ZOOLOGIST OR AN ANTHROPOLOGIST? HOW IS IT THAT YOU ARE MAKING THIS UNEDUCATED ASSUMPTION? THERE ARE PRIMATES THAT CAN SPEAK IN SIGN LANGUAGE, PLAY VIDEO GAMES AND SHOW DEPTH OF EMOTION ONLY KNOWN TO HUMANS. I THINK YOU SHOULD GO BACK TO SCHOOL, PICK UP A BOOK OR SOMETHING, BECAUSE YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

Answer 18

maybe they are.. come back in 500 thousand years and they might be different.

just so you know. man evolved from "ape like" creatures.

some apes are more evolved than humans, but they evolved into better apes, not another branch of homo-sapiens.

Answer 19

Yes, animals are smart. Crow in japan (or usa. idn) knows how to use the car to break open the shell of a nut, and eat the insides.

Answer 20

Who says that we are the top of the evolutionary ladder?

Is it not plausible that, for arguments sake, dolphins where once were we are now and did not like that existence, therefore evolved in to a more harmonious state of being???

Answer 21

good question! I would like to know that too!

evolution is a THEORY. (meaning assumption or guess in dictionary)

Answer 22

it takes a long long time.....and plenty of animals have shown intellegence....and are getting smarter...but evolution takes time....

Answer 23

I heard that intelligence is determined by the number of ridges, or crinkles, in the brain.

Can you imagine how pointless a smart animal would be? It's like hey I'm a smart dog, but I can only walk on 4 paws, wag my tail and bark. What sad irony. I wish I were dumb like the other dogs so I could l**k myself and not have to ponder my fate. Why me?????

[Barbie] - Humans did not evolve over "billions" of years, it was at most 2 million. And if you scaled that period to a 24-hour clock, almost all of the human evolution has occured in the final second of the final minute of that day. There was obviously an intervention at some point.

Answer 24

u dont understand how evulotion works. evolution is not about 'getting smarter;' its about adapting better to one's envriomnent.  they probably will never get 'smarter.'

Answer 25

Yet another religious person showing their ignorance about evolution.  According to evolution our intelligence is a mutation, a fluke, an accident.  Evolution is not about getting smarter it is about survival and surprisingly our intelligence has allowed us to live this long.

Answer 26

because we didn't evolve from them. it's a bunch of c**p. *hugs&kisses*

Answer 27

This is the most assinine question I've read all week.

Answer 28

'Evolution' works like more of a step-function. There is very little or no change for long periods of time. Then, suddenly, a new species emerges and is either stronger than others and survives, or more often is weaker and dies out quickly.

Answer 29

Who says they don't? We only have a couple of generations of data on primate intelligence. Evolution takes many millions of years.

Answer 30

Yeah, so lame that it revolutionized biology and medicine and created several new branches of science.

They didn't evolve into humans because that's not how it works.  Separate species do not evolve into the same species.  Maybe you are asking instead why our line and, say, the chimpanzee line split off back in the day?  It's probably because we occupy different ecological niches.  Chimps are forest dwellers, and our hominid ancestors probably evolved on the savannah.  Even when we did start living in the same place, we have different diets and habits- we eat more meat than they do, for instance.  If two species aren't in direct competition for resources, they're probably not going to push one another into extinction.  Why would they?  A savannah dwelling human and a forest dwelling chimp aren't going to meet one another.  And a forest dwelling human doesn't eat the same thing as a chimp, so we're not taking all of their calories from them.

Chimps probably don't need to get smarter.  Brains take up an incredible amount of energy, so there had better be a good reason to get nice, big ones.  Our ancestors ate more different foods than the chimps' ancestors, and we had a more trying environment to deal with.  It made sense for us to become more intelligent, but chimps do just fine with the IQs that they have.

Answer 31

humans and apes r evolved from one main ancestor. eventually both groups evolved to be different. therefore apes will never be humans an humans will never be apes!