Are humans the final species of evolution?

Question

I know certain species have something in their genes that won't allow them to evolve anymore such as the mule. Are humans the last stop in their evolutionary chain?

I don;t think we're perfect, theres certain things humans could use that we weren't given or evolved from, like wings, imagine that? No wasting money on gas anymore!

Mutually Assured Destruction is an idea that works to prevent such an instance. However, it does not include rogue countries, which sadly, still exist.

Answer 1

Humans didn't evolve. Science itself refutes Darwinism. Science is disproving evolution more every day. There is less evidence for evolution today than there was when Charles Darwin first came up with the theory (hypothesis). There are a lot of scientists that don't believe in evolution, and more are changing their beliefs all the time. Here is a partial list of creation scientists (past and present).
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-scientists.html
With all the evidence against it I really don't see how any open minded intelligent human being could believe in evolution. With the lack of proof for evolution it takes more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in creation and intelligent design. There is a lot more evidence for intelligent design than there is for evolution. Evolution isn't mathematically possible. The complexity of life points to Intelligent Design as revealed by such complex structures as:

* Cells and DNA
In Darwin's time, scientists thought cells were just blobs of protoplasm. Since that time the advance of science has uncovered ever more powerful evidence that what Christians believe is true on all levels, including the natural world. And that is becoming even clearer today as scientists learn more about what is inside the cell-and especially the structure of DNA.

According to cell biologist Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, "The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines."

Even the simplest cells are bristling with high-tech machinery. On the outside, their surfaces are studded with sensors, gates, pumps and identification markers.

Inside, cells are jam-packed with power plants, automated workshops and recycling units. Miniature monorails whisk materials from one location to another. No such system could arise in a blind, step-by-step Darwinian process.

The most advanced, automated modern factory, with its computers and robots all coordinated on a precisely timed schedule, is less complex than the inner workings of a single cell.

"A bacterium is far more complex than any inanimate system known to man. There is not a laboratory in the world which can compete with the biochemical activity of the smallest living organism. One cell is more complicated than the largest computer that man has ever made." - Sir James Gray, from Cambridge University

DNA is like a language in the heart of the cell, a molecular message, a set of instructions telling the cell how to construct proteins-much like the software needed to run a computer. Moreover, the amount of information DNA includes is staggering: A single cell of the human body contains three or four times more information as all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As a result, the question of the origin of life must now be redefined as the question of the origin of biological information. Can information arise by natural forces alone? Or does it require an intelligent agent?

DNA is composed of ordinary chemicals (bases, sugars, phosphates that react according to ordinary laws. What makes DNA function as a message is not the chemicals themselves but rather their sequence, their pattern. The chemicals in DNA are grouped into molecules (called nucleotides) that act like letters in a message, and they must be in a particular order if the message is going to be intelligible. If the letters are scrambled, the result is nonsense. So the crucial question is whether the sequence of chemical "letters" arose by natural causes or whether it required an intelligent source. Is it the product of law or design?

Since DNA contains information, the case can be stated even more strongly in terms of information theory, a field of research that investigates the ways information is transmitted. The naturalistic scientist has only two possible ways to explain the origin of life-either chance or natural law. But information theory provides a powerful tool for discounting both of these explanations. Both chance and law lead to structures with low information content, whereas DNA has a very high information content."

The sequence of basis in DNA can not be explained by natural law because there are no chemical laws that make any sequence more likely than another. At the same time these sequences are so complicated that they can not be explained by chance.

"Based on probability factors any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10. Such a number, if written out, would read:

480,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.

"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence (and even that gives it the benefit of the doubt!). Any species known to us, including the smallest single-cell bacteria, have enormously larger number of nucleotides than 100 or 1000. In fact, single cell bacteria display about 3,000,000 nucleotides, aligned in a very specific sequence. This means that there is no mathematical probability whatever for any known species to have been the product of a random occurrence—random mutations (to use the evolutionist's favorite expression)."—I. L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong, 1984, p. 205.

The study of DNA provides powerful new evidence that life is the product of intelligent design.

Today, holding on to the hope that some natural process will be found to explain DNA is supremely irrational. The elusive process that naturalists hope to find would have to be completely unprecedented, different in kind from any we currently know.

Although humans share about 97% of their DNA structure with some higher non-human animals, those last 3% are so vital that all of human civilization, religion, art, science, philosophy and, most importantly, their moral nature depends upon it.

It is the 3% that distinguishes the theistic view of man's origin from the non-theistic view, as well as from the various societal and cultural consequences distinguishing each belief. As John Quincy Adams warned long ago, without a belief in theistic origins [in that three percent difference] man will have no conscience. He will have no other law than that of the tiger and the shark."

ON ALL FRONTS, scientists are being forced to face up to the evidence for an intelligent cause. Ever since big bang theory was proposed, cosmologists have had to wrestle with the implications that the universe had an absolute beginning-and therefore a transcendent creator. The discovery of the information content in DNA is forcing biologists to recognize an intelligent cause for the origin of life. So, too, the fact of irreducible complexity is raising the question of design in living things.
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/biology.htm

* The Fossil Record

Darwin believed that the fossil record would reveal thousands or millions of life forms which would demonstrate a gradual change from one kind to another (called transitional forms).

But the fossil record has been against the Darwinian theory from the very beginning. It's true that different kinds of organisms lived on the earth at different times. But what is not seen in the fossil record is the steady progressive change of one kind of thing into something completely different. Instead, if something new shows up in the rocks, it shows up all at once and fully formed, and then it stays the same.

If evolution means the steady progressive change of one kind of thing into something completely different, then the fossil record contradicts evolution.

Given the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record, evolutionists quietly acknowledge this is still a "research issue".

There is virtually nothing in the fossil record that can be used as evidence of a transitional life form When apparent examples of useful mutations are examined thoroughly, it becomes clear that no transitional creatures exist anywhere in the fossil record.

John Bonner, a biologist at Princeton, writes that traditional textbook discussions of ancestral descent are "a festering mass of unsupported assertions." In recent years, paleontologists have retreated from simple connect-the-dot scenarios linking earlier and later species. Instead of ladders, they now talk of bushes. What we see in the fossils, according to this view, are only the twigs, the final end-products of evolution, while the key transitional forms which would give a clue about the origin of major animal groups remain completely hidden.

The blank spots on evolutionary "tree" charts occur at just the points where, according to Darwin's theory, the crucial changes had to take place. The direct ancestors of all the major orders: primates, carnivores, and so forth are completely missing. There is no fossil evidence for a "grandparent" of the monkey, for example. "Modern gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere," writes paleontologist Donald Johansen. "They are here today; they have no yesterday." The same is true of giraffes, elephants, wolves, and all species; they all simply burst upon the scene de novo [anew], as it were.

So many questions arise in the study of fossils (paleontology) that even many evolutionary paleontologists put little stock in the fossil record. Basing one's belief in evolution on the shaky ground of paleontology can scarcely be considered scientific.

"We are about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time." - Dr. David M. Raup, Curator of Geology, Museum of Natural History, Chicago

The fossil record is often so sparse that there are numerous cases where groups survived for tens of millions of years without leaving a single fossil.

The lack of the hypothesized intermediates between one species and another is a significant criticism of Darwinism. If land animals truly came from sea creatures, there should be ample evidence of this, such as fossils of fish with their fins turning into legs. Darwin wrote in his Origin of Species that "innumerable transitional forms must have existed." The predicted large numbers of fossil intermediate forms have never been found.
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/fossil.htm

* The Cambrian Explosion
Nearly all animal phyla made their first appearance in the fossil record at essentially the same time, an interval of some 5 million years (about 525 to 530 million years ago) called the "Cambrian Explosion.

Scientists have found that these early fossils exhibit more anatomical body designs than exist today, and that early animals, the trilobites, had eyes as fully developed as their counterparts today.

Many of the Cambrian fauna, still survive today, all looking much like they did over 500 million years ago. The prominent British evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, comments, "... We find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.

Two places in the world that have an abundance of early (Cambrian) fossils; the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies and the Chengjiang site in China.

In Stephen J. Gould's popular book, Wonderful Life, he points out that the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossils include "a range of disparity in anatomical design never again equaled, and not matched today by all the creatures in the world's oceans.

Further, these fossils contain some twenty to thirty kinds of arthropods*** that cannot be placed in any modern group. The modern arthropods, consisting of almost a million species, can all fit into four major groups. But "one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs." Today there are about 38 phyla in existence, but the Canadian, Chinese and other Cambrian sites reveal over fifty phyla.

There has been a decrease in diversity (probably due to global catastrophes). This is the reverse of what evolutionary theory predicts.

Besides diversity, the Burgess Shale shows exquisite detail, right down to "the last filament of a trilobite's gill," or the last meal in a worm's gut.

The Chengjiang site has even greater detail, and is earlier. According to Paul Chien, the chairman of the biology department at the University of San Francisco, said the preservation is such that internal organs, nerves, and even the water ducts of jellyfish are observable.

Researchers found striking similarities between the compound eyes of the Cambrian trilobites and those of modern insects. According to Riccardo Levi-Setti, "Trilobites could see in their immediate environment with amazingly sophisticated optical devices in the form of large composite eyes. ... The number of individual optical elements in the compound eye could vary from approximately one hundred to more than fifteen thousand in a single eye, a range not very different from that found in modern insects.

The conclusion is that the eye, a complex visual system, was fully formed and functional extremely early in the fossil record. Obviously, this is not predicted by evolutionary theory.

Until recently, the phylum of vertebrates had been considered a later arrival in evolutionary history. But not now! Even the vertebrate phylum now extends into the Cambrian period, especially with the recent discovery of two fossil fish in China.

The two new fossils from Chengjiang are the most convincing Early Cambrian vertebrates ever found. The insects and other land invertebrates are also a very important group, and these practically all seem to be living fossils.

These complex animals were present at the beginning of multicellular life and did not appear later as is predicted by evolutionary theory.

Evolution does not explain the abrupt appearance of complex forms of life early in the fossil record or these fossils' unequaled diversity. The implication of the Cambrian explosion of diverse, fully functional, and multicellular life is that evolutionary theory is falsified.

Life did not start out simple and evolve into more complex and diverse animals; it was complex and diverse right at the beginning. This contradiction between the fossil data and the predictions of evolutionary theory falsifies the theory.

"The facts of paleontology seem to support creation rather than evolution. All the major groups of invertebrates appear suddenly in the first fossiliferous strata. (Cambrian) of the earth with their distinct specializations, indicating that they were all created at almost the same time." - David Enock Associate Professor of Biology. BS Yeshiva College, MS Hunter College

Even George Gaylord Simpson, Harvard high priest of evolution had to admit, “In spite of the examples, it remains true (as every paleontologist knows) that most new species, genera and families appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/explosion.htm

* Scientific evidence that dinosaurs and humans really did coexist together are the numerous intermingled dinosaur and human tracks that have been found in the riverbed of the Paluxy River in Texas for more than fifty years. In addition, 3,000 dinosaur footprints with human footprints right alongside them were recently discovered in Turkmenistan.
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/dinosaurs.htm

* Scientific evidence casts serious doubts on the theory of evolution, for example:

* The Fossil Record (Updated 3 July, 2005)
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/fossil.htm

* Living "Fossils"
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/living.htm

* The Cambrian Explosion
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/explosion.htm

* New T.Rex Discoveries (Updated 10 June, 2005)
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/t-rex.htm

* "Missing Links"
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/misslinks.htm

* Anthropic Principle
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/anthropic.htm

* Irreducible complexity
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/irreducible.htm

* Biological Evidence
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/biology.htm

* The Moon
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/moon.htm

* Earth's Fight Against Solar Attacks
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/earthfight.htm

* Scientific arguments against evolution:
Science itself refutes Darwinism
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/arguments.shtml

* The Origins of Darwinism
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/origins.shtml

* Darwinism is Racist
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/racist.shtml

* Evidence for Intelligent Design
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/intelligent-design.shtml

* Creation Science
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/creationscience.shtml

* Evidence For A Young Earth and Universe
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/youngearth.shtml

* Age of man:
The Race of Man Is Younger Than Previously Thought
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/ageofman.shtml

* Darwinism Is Strongly Rooted But Is Being Challenged
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/summary.shtml

* References
http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/references.shtml

* Do real scientists believe in Creation?
Partial list of Creation Scientists
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-scientists.html

* http://www.drdino.com/

Answer 2

I hope not, when evolution ends, that means that the species has become extinct.

Part of your misunderstanding is the belief that evolution is linear or has some final goal or destination. Not all adaptations are "beneficial" in the long run, and the environment is constantly changing. At the same time that we are adapting and evolving, so are the other life forms around us. Especially life forms like bacteria and viruses which have much faster breeding and life cycles than we do. That is why we are always getting new strains of the flu and pandemics such as avian flu. We might not be able to keep up. Humans are constantly adapting, through our culture as well as through scientific and medical advances (part of culture, after all) so don't loose hope. But we are physically adapting, as well. The current obesity epidemic is probably eventually going to effect reproductive cycles.

Now what do you think?

Answer 3

You are looking at evolutionary change as a sort of hierarchy, a chain, with "least evolved" at the bottom and "most evolved' (which people seem to think of as man) at the top.

Actually, bacteria, for example, are FAR "more evolved" than man. They've been at it a whole lot longer, their generations can be only minutes or hours long, and there are a heck of a lot more of them than there are us. They are also way more different from each other than we are from each other. More complex does not mean more evolved.

The picture of the development of living organisms as they evolve is less like a ladder or chain (or even a tree) than like a Koosh ball that just keeps getting bigger. If one of the little arms stops growing, another keeps on, and the whole thing can twist and turn and still look the same. Not one point is more "Kooshy" than another.

We can certainly look at species and individuals, but the big picture is a unified whole. Don't miss the forest for the trees. ~G~

Answer 4

Evolution is not a chain, nor is there a last stop, it is directionless. We humans are NOT the penultimate product of evolution. Organisms that have characteristics that better enable them to adapt and thrive in their environment will survive and pass on those characteristics to its offspring. Those that are not fit for their environment will perish before reproducing and therefore their characteristics will not be passed down to their offspring. Mules are sterile and therefore cannot have offspring so of course they won't evolve.
But evolution just happens. sometimes causing organisms to change for the better, worse, or not at all. For example the coelancath is a fish off the coast of madagascar that looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, but certain bacteria and viruses can evolve quickly. Evolution is isn't a goal, it's a solution to problems organisms face in order to survive. Humans aren't special because we have evolved, we're just simply not extinct because of it. In the future we may or may not evolve. There is no way to know. Dinosaurs were on this earth for a much longer period of time than humans have been so far and look what happened to them....

Answer 5

The notion of a "final species" in evolution is no more a possibility than the notion of a tree having a "final branch." Evolution continuously acts on the world, including us. Humans have evolved to be slightly taller on average over the past 2000 years alone. Are we a different species? No, we have not undergone sufficient isolation so as to speciate. But evolution has changed aspects of different lineages of humanity just as it brought them about in the first place. Alongside us, millions, if not billions of species of living things continue to evolve every second of every day, and there will never be a culminating point at which evolution "completes" and some final species is achieved.

Answer 6

Of course not. Evolution isn't an intelligent force with some final product in mind. It's a blind, ever acting, ever existing force. As long as there are living organisms, they will be changing. Humans have changed greatly in the past million years, and they will continue to change in the next million.

Mules can't breed because they're the sterile product of a donkey and a horse mating. That is a completely different subject.

Also, please don't listen to the God Warrior soccer moms who believe they are experts on the validity of evolution.

Answer 7

Absoloutly not. A mule cannot evolve because it is infertile. It is a mix between a horse and a donkey. When 2 species breed, most of the time they are unable to reproduce, that is, they are infertile, as far as humans go, I dont think we are going to go breed with a horse, but since we are fertile, we will continue to evolve.

Answer 8

No, Humans will end up killing themselves. The theory of MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction in the Cold War will happen and exterminate us. And then, the bacteria will evolve into something wierd. Like a chicken headed, elephant nosed, human. yep, thats what going to happen. Nostrodamos told me himself, and so did Mrs. Cleo.

Answer 9

yeah, There must be something after Humans, may be ideas of humans with wings are also unavoidable, the bodu builders have bigger lads, that lads can be developed into wings, and the theory of MAD is also true, but we have an immediate evolution "Zyborg". Man coupled with smart machines. A Zyborg man can be having wings to fly, wheels to move around. extendable hands to fetch distant objects.... Speak out using loud speakers, that works getting signals directly from brain.

Answer 10

Not all mules are sterile.

Humans are still evolving just we are growing bigger and each generations more people are born without wisdom teeth.

If the climate continues to change so will people and all other animals.

Answer 11

Definitely not - evolution never stops. It just keeps going, constantly adapting organisms to the ever-changing environment. In a few million years time, humanity will be very different.