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> In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis. Yet in all instances, the position confers on Ho

• ramcle 4y ago
  I think this is supposed to mean that humans appeared relatively late in Earth's history ("two minutes to midnight"), instead of being there from the very beginning. Or to put it in a different way: much more species appeared before humans existed than after they already existed.
• pedro1976 4y ago
  What separates us afaik is - in bible terms - that we left the paradise, by becoming conscious.
  • blenderdt 4y ago
    In biblical terms this doesn't make sense to me because before they left the paradise Adam and Eve already had the task to step down to the animals and name them (step down as in: take care of them). What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God. If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?
    • JonChesterfield 4y ago
      Octopus and dolphins seem likely to be conscious. Ravens too.
      • thriftwy 4y ago
        But are they sentient? Can an octopus sit on a board of directors?
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • nicoburns 4y ago
          They can’t communicate with humans, and their thought patterns are likely very different to ours. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just as complex. Whales and dolphins especially.
          • thriftwy 4y ago
            I'm not a big believer of thought complex thought patterns that fail to manifest in any meaningful way. If they are as sentient, they should have to make a difference.
            • 52-6F-62 4y ago
              Maybe they’re just wiser than us.
            • vkou 4y ago
              Just because we don't, or can't understand the way those patterns manifest does not imply that they are meaningful.
            • krageon 4y ago
              > fail to manifest in any meaningful way To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)
            • inglor_cz 4y ago
              One of our major advantages against other animals are versatile hands with opposable thumbs. I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains. Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.
    • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      I feel like the main difference is that we shape the world around us to a degree far greater than any other being, to the point where it affected our evolution tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I mean yeah, some animals use tools like sticks or rocks to get food, or build rudimentary shelters like nests, or even plant or store food for next year, but they don't build fires and cook their food, they don't produce more than they need for themselves and their immediate families, etc. I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.
      • shaky-carrousel 4y ago
        The first oxygen producing organisms altered the planet way more than us. In a way, they terraformed Earth.
      • jamincan 4y ago
        Beavers were arguably greater engineers than humans when modern humans first emerged several hundred thousand years ago.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      >If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious? Well, they don't seen to have that great of a civilization
  • dunefox 4y ago
    You mean I have to do 9 hours of excel a day because a monkey ate a mushroom millions of years ago.
    • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      Was it a mushroom or a black monolith?
      • b112 4y ago
        You just picked the new brand name for my shrooms. "Black Monolith" I will email you royalty checks next week.
  • gorgoiler 4y ago
    Nice euphemism you’ve got there. We didn’t leave paradise. We got thrown out on our bare behinds :) (Good point though.)
    • rtp 4y ago
      Where's the evidence of that?
      • messe 4y ago
        I think the poster is clearly speaking within the context of the biblical narrative, and not asserting the factuality of it.
  • eevilspock 4y ago
    I thought it was Original Sin. And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.
    • krapp 4y ago
      By some interpretations, sentience is the original sin (or at least the consequence of it.) Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, after all, and if you take the serpent at its word, the knowledge was to "be like God, knowing both good and evil." Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.
      • eevilspock 4y ago
        Yep, the two are intertwined. This is actually some deep philosophy related to the determinism/free will debate and how it relates to morality, embedded in religious scripture.
• warent 4y ago
  This argument is always really odd to me. You'll hear people say things like "if evolution is real then why are there still monkeys?" As if anyone is claiming we're derived from modern chimps... Meanwhile the ancient apes that we share as common ancestors with modern apes are long extinct. Not to mention evolution doesn't require an extinction as far as I know. See polar bears
  • simonh 4y ago
    Also even the population of brown bears that polar bears are descended from didn't go extinct either. They're still here, they're just polar bears.
    • adolph 4y ago
      "The population of brown bears that polar bears are descended from" are presumably dead, right? The current population of brown bears are likewise descended from the same population of brown bears.
  • neuronic 4y ago
    It doesn't seem far off to me to interpret evolution as meaning that specific lineages didn't go extinct. The common ancestor between us and bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs is still around. They're just bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangs and humans nowadays because some populations simply matched their environments over a (long) time and became more fit in their niche. The question what constitutes a species, for sake of our classification desires, is also very relevant to this. Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Why do some of us have Neanderthal genes?
    • technothrasher 4y ago
      > Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Generally, but then you have things like multiple canids being different species but able to produce viable hybrids (e.g. the large number of coywolves we have near me). Since "species" is a classification we made up which doesn't map to reality particularly well, it gets pretty fuzzy at the edges.
• phreeza 4y ago
  We are last in the sense that we are leaf nodes on the tree of life (at least for the moment)? But of course that is by no means a unique trait, the tree would have many many leaf nodes.
  • kimi 4y ago
    And all of them are currently "good enough", so roughly at the same level of fitness. Of course, models that have been relatively stable for 400M years, like sharks, are in some sense "better" than the fad of the day, like us.
    • basch 4y ago
      "good" shouldnt be conflated with "most evolved." To be more evolved, means to be more changed from the source. It means specialization for a specific scenario. Often "more evolved" can be "worse" once the environment changes, and that specialization becomes a disadvantage instead of an advantage. Or that a change brings one benefit but another potentially larger pitfall in the long run. The amount of evolution should be measured in iteration cycles, how much change over how much time. It's also possible that something iterated many many times quickly long in the past and then stopped, vs something that just started making changes more recently.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    >We are last in the sense that we are leaf nodes on the tree of life (at least for the moment Who said that? There are tons of newer than us leafs (organisms that evolved after we did). If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.
    • Pyramus 4y ago
      I think you misunderstood parent. There is a natural order on the tree of life starting in the first living organism (the root node) and ending in organisms that are still around (the leaf nodes). With 'last' parent meant 'last with respect to that order', not necessarily in the sense of 'older' and 'newer' (which correlates with this order, as you pointed out).
• deleted 4y ago
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• mcv 4y ago
  It's also incorrect about the biblical story of Genesis. Because Genesis contains two creation stories (though biblical literalists prefer to brush away that fact). Quoting a bit more from the article: > Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals, a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis. Genesis 1 indeed puts humans last, but Genesis 2 puts them first. And Genesis 2 is the older story of the two. Maybe that explains why it's more in line with those folk zoologists? Genesis 1 (a poem, structured by the days of the week) was written later, possibly during the Babylonian exile, and may be more informed by the science of the Babylonians; it addresses not just the creation of the Earth and the creatures on it, but also the sun and stars, and the passage of time; topics that the Babylonians were very interested in.
  • bambax 4y ago
    Well, regarding the story of creation in the Bible, it's not clear that humans come "first" even in Genesis 2, if we follow the story. Here's how it goes: God creates Adam, then Eve, then they have two children, Cain and Abel. Then Cain kills Abel. And then Cain says to God: "I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me." And God responds: "Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over." And God "put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him." (Genesis 4, 14-15) But who are they? (whoever, anyone, no one) At this point in the story there should only be three people on earth: Adam, Eve and Cain. And in the following verse it says that "Cain made love to his wife". Where does she come from? One possible explanation is that the story of creation talks about one specific tribe, among other tribes that would pre-exist to the family of Adam, or at least co-exist. Which is kind of relevant to the debate of different species of humans.
    • mcv 4y ago
      That's true, but that's Genesis 4. A continuation of the story in Genesis 2, but not really that creation story itself anymore. My comment is more about the structural similarity of the creation in Genesis 2 story to those "folk zoologists", than about what it means in the context of the rest of Genesis. The fact that according to Genesis 4 other people did exist is a very good but in my opinion completely different issue.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  This sort of teleological and "ranked" view where what we ourselves consider "most developed" we assume must also be "last" or "have undergone more evolution" reminds me of our some of our views of human social patterns too. Like thinking a "culture" that some people have labelled/categorized as "hunter gatherer" therefore somehow is "less developed" or even has "less history" than other social groupings, and reveals the way humans were a long time ago -- whereas in fact any human culture on the planet at the same time has the same amount of history and development behind them. Some of this is covered in Graeber and Wengrow's recent _The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity_. We really want to impute a direction to changes over time (whether biological or social); to think that the changes always go in the same direction; that it's a direction of "better"; that the things we currently value as 'better' are that directional 'better'; and that therefore anything we think is 'not as good' is somehow "earlier" or "less developed". None of those are accurate ways to understand actual historical changes over time, whether biological/evolutionary or social or anything else really.
  • jollybean 4y ago
    Well, at least we have 'undergone more evolution', possibly, arguably. But if you want to deconstruct the argument fully, evolution actually isn't really anything at all - shifting genes in a shifting environment. Like a rock rolling down a hill, bouncing off of other rocks. It's not even a 'process' and it probably should be called: 'Species Drift' or something like that. And taken even further - you and I are just 'lumps of material bouncing around'. The term 'intelligence' has no scientific meaning either. How can a bag of random particles be 'intelligent' or 'create'? You're not 'reading' this, you're randomly bouncing through the universe. It just seems like you are 'doing' something. But you're not 'doing' anything more than the chair you are sitting on. It's there, you are there. You both got there the same way. But the matter of fact is, we do have metaphysical foundations: Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human 'Kindgoms' in which we believe that the 'Human' condition is more evolved, at very least Han the 'Mineral' and likely 'Vegetable'. We basically take that, and the presence of life as 'matter of fact' and a kind reality. It just doesn't jive well with Scientific Materialism. And if we do accept those basic principles, well, we are 'pretty much 'more' evolved than chimps', even though technically I do understand it's also reasonable to just say 'we are siblings with common ancestors' and that's that.
• rangersanger 4y ago
  Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale Nature of History does an excellent job explaining why the textbook visualization of the evolutionary tree reenforces this notion and why it needs to be done away with. It may be a wild understanding, but when every middle schooler is shown "The March of Progress" can it be any surprise that folks think we're more evolved?
• crimsonalucard 4y ago
• soheil 4y ago
  > that we ourselves consider very important I was with you until that statement. The concept of "importance" itself is also something we ourselves consider ie. you're not a monkey therefore you don't know if importance is even a thing for a monkey, or if it is and that it appears that they prefer bananas over AK 47's you're still not a monkey so you won't be able to be sure. Therefore to attribute having the same concept of importance as us to another species is absurd.
  • codeflo 4y ago
    I don’t think we disagree, if I understand you correctly, that’s more or less what I wanted to express.
• bratwurst3000 4y ago
  Arent we the only species that has a prefortal cortex and can make plans as group for the future?