Planet of the Apes??

Question

If you took gorrilas or chimps out of there natural envoiroment and brought them into ours ,took away there need to forrage for food or protect themselves from predators ,would after several generations their physiology change so that there brain would develop more as there limbs became less powerful ,eventually capable of speech and abstact thought in a 'speeded up ' version of human evolution or would even after several hundred generations they remain much as they are today ?

Answer 1

The short answer is no.

The long answer is yes.

Which is to say, no, if you simply treat other primates as humans they will not turn into humans. Why would they? If they can survive at all as monkeys in the human world, so too will their successors.

Even if you put them under the same environmental pressures as proto-humans they will not necessarily turn into humans. To do so would necessitate them having all the exact same random mutations that produced humans, which is vanishingly small in likelihood.

On the other hand, yes, you probably can FORCE them to develop into something more humanlike if you apply pressure properly. Just not the way you described. Here's the best way:

Collect several thousand monkeys. Choose the twenty most human-like. Get rid of the rest. Breed the twenty until you have several thousand again. Repeat until you have humans. You will note that this requires LOTS of breeding and discarding LOTS of monkeys. But there is no reason why this is impossible. It will just take a long time (at least we start off 99% of the way there!).

You could do the same thing with humans, and some people have actually tried by various means. We of course know of many vicious dictators who committed one form of genocide or another in the name of 'racial purity', but there have been other socities who have taken the more peaceful approach of just isolating themselves into communities with only 'desireable' genes. This is called eugenics. To my knowledge, none of these communities has lasted more than a generation or two, so the possibility of such a long-term project as either monkey or human improvement seems a long way off.

Hope that helps! When in the gene pool, keep your head above water!

Answer 2

There is no reason to believe this would be the case in my opinion. Chimps evolved from the same ancestor that we did. Humans took the route of gaining intelligence and retaining the upright bipedal behavior. Chimps moved back into the forest niche and concentrated their evolution in their body structure. A human could not even come close to keeping up with a chimp in its niche. The chimp has evolved significantly since we shared a common anscestor. It might be easier for that common anscestor to evolve intelligence. Still, I am sure it is possible that they would evolve intelligence enough for language. It can be argued that they are nearly there anyway. I think it would take more than several hundred generations.

Answer 3

humorous action picture that. i like the thought that if mankind perished yet another species could fill that area of interest in nature. Apes, or dolphins, may be the logical inheritors... even regardless of the undeniable fact that it beneficial could take an prolonged long term. even regardless of the undeniable fact that I grant this. Koko the gorilla became into taught hand sign language interior the 1970's and mastered communique, with a vocabulary of hundreds of words. Her keepers got here to evaluate her basically a bushy guy or woman, yet a guy or woman whether. different monkeys have been taught the sign language via HER; and while one became into decrease back to the wild interior the 1980's, interior ten years, many hundreds of apes have been modern in Africa who had mastered the hand indicators. it is all verifiable information... and verrrrrry thrilling to those that evaluate human beings so more suitable and particular.

Answer 4

Possibly as I read a book once abou a baby chimp that they trained all it life and it could say 4 words in context and could also identify over 300 pictures of inanimate objects. It could also point at the pictures to ask for what it was wanting.
Your theory could maybe work if it was carried out over a few generations of the same family of chimps, scientific studies have already shown that wild chimps are still evolving and have been known to use tools which are becoming more advanced.
Who knows what lies ahead?

Answer 5

No, you don't see this happening with zoo animals, and I don't think it would happen with the situation of even more human interaction that you suggest. Not in several generations anyway, in several hundred you might see a change.

I don't see non-human apes developing vocal speech any time soon either, in the environment we have today it's far to easy to use written or signed communication without the need for speech. As for abstract thought, while we don't have any concrete evidence showing other apes are capable of complex cognition and abstract thought, we don't have concrete evidence showing they aren't.

Answer 6

Mmmmm I wonder :)
Maybe if they were completely separated from their own species and treated to all intents and purposes as human babies from birth, it would happen to some small degree. I tend to think they they would still remain animals in a human world, they just have not got the brain power to reason as we do and they have not got the physiology to speak as we do. Communication has occured in experiments where the primates have used sign language, but it is quite basic language that the primates aquired.
I think that in trhe long run such experiments would be cruel to the animal, best to preserve their wild habitats and let them do what comes naturally :)

Answer 7

No. This is a variation on the old, disproven, "use and disuse" theory of Lamarck, who thought that species were formed when a population of animals started doing or started not doing things. He thought giraffes developed long necks because they stretched them looking for food in high places and passed their suddenly longer necks to their offspring, for example. And ostriches lost wings that enabled flight because they stopped using them, preferring to walk...The classic experiment that disproved this idea was one where they got a lot of mice and cut off their tails before they had reached puberty, and when they became mature and mated, they produced mice with tails, on and on and on and on....

It took a long long time for humans to evolve out of previous forms, and it takes a long time for other animals to evolve. Natural selection is essentially a case where the environment that a species is in favors those individuals who happen to fit into the environment slightly better in some way than others, so they pass the genes that make this slight difference on to offspring, which are more numerous because the slight difference causes the individuals to survive in greater numbers, and the genes get passed around and those that have them survive better and the ones that show the characteristic better survive better, and so on until a new characteristic is "perfected" by this constant interaction with the environment. So evolution depends on mutation and on chance variation in genes in individuals, selected for by their natural environment. And is a lengthy process.

Answer 8

It would depend on their genetic potential through mutation. However, apes and primates are limited in their potential because they do not possess the same genetic advantages that humans have started with.

In other words, apes are NOT human.

Even if you believe in evolution entirely, apes would then be a branch away from human beings. One did not evolve from the other. According to evolution, human being (homosapians) branched off a common branch that the primates are in. Therefore, if there were a common ancestor, it has long been gone.

Humans evolved to become increasingly intelligent and dependent on frontal lobe functions of the brain. While apes/primates continued to depend on their primitive abilities. Therefore, I don't think your theory would hold up.

Apes and primates would continue to be primitive compared to humans since they are at a genetic disadvantage from their beginning.

Answer 9

By removing the need to find food then there would be no way to remove stupid members of their species and there would be no need for them to develop better brains. If you killed off the most stupid ones then they would evolve greater mental capabilities but this would be the only way to force this kind of evolution.

Answer 10

They would remain pretty much as they are today. They have evolved just about as far as they can. Because their DNA is only around 95% the same as ours & their voice boxes & vocal chords are different they will never speak like we do.