Why have animals taken a break from evolving over the past few thousand years?

Question

Shouldn't apes be making fire by now?

Dillicio (below) I am refering to the apes that currently populate the Earth

Jeremiah (below) LOL Great point!

Answer 1

They haven't. Why don't you try (as hard as that may be) to learn a little about evolution before demonstrating your ignorance to the world?

Answer 2

If you want to see evolutionin action just read up on H5N1 which has evolved to jump the avian/human barrier.

Contrary to what your church tells you, the earth is over 6,000 years old so a few thousand years is not much time at all but even in this time:

Man has grown in height by about a foot or so. Look at the doorways of old (150 years plus) buildings.

Answer 3

They are still evolving, its a slow process. The way it works is that animals that are weaker to adapting to their environment die as ones that have stronger genetic traits survive and reproduce. Here's an example say humans were dying off because they had no fingers, then you were born with a rare birth defect that causes you to have fingers. Although the fingers were the result of a random mutation in genetics it happened to be beneficial for survival due to the advantage of dexterity. As a result of your survival due to fingers you are able to live long enough to sexual maturity to reproduce your gene. Then generation by generation and generations later more humans with fingers are born from spreading your gene to your children. Then eventually over a long period of time humans without fingers die off because of their poor dexterity and inability to grip things even for their own survival. Therefore all the humans with fingers slowly replace them. If you were thinking that apes just magically turned into humans then you have a completely wrong concept of evolution. All the time animals get born with weird birth defects and on rare occasion some of those defects actually are helping them survive better so they spread that gene. Its just MILLIONS of years later not THOUSANDS will the pattern be significant. (For some reason Christians tend to think a thousand is a big number)

Answer 4

I didn't know they had. Mind you, you're not going to see a great deal of evolution over a few thousand years, nothing like what you'd see over a few hundred million. It's a pretty slow process, usually.

And no, even if you could fast forward a few million years to the descendents of present day non human apes they wouldn't necessarily be making fire. Evolution isn't set according to what humans call "progress".

Answer 5

Macroevolution can take hundreds of thousands of years plus. Dont expect to be witnessing any new species in your lifetime. Species with quickly reproducing life forms display evolution all the time. For example, bacteria and flies. But humans will take many generations, which goes for apes too. Keep in mind evolution is gradual, everything around you is a product of evolution, open your eyes!

Answer 6

Because we have mistranslated God's measure of time in the six days of creation as 24 hour days. When in fact God meant eras of evolution consisting of thousands or millions of years to each era. And on the seventh day, ( modern era ), God rested and stopped creating new life on Earth because every living creature on Earth were created to coexist in the modern era of evolution that we modern humans are part of. The only creatures that will now evolve on Earth will be the inferior genetically engineered life forms human scientists will create and later regret from God's already genetically perfected life forms on Earth.

Answer 7

Apes are evolving to survive human pressures on them and their environment. If they don't or can't - they die out. Unless we die out or evolve to more cooperative interactions first. Hmmmm

And a few thousand years isn't that long.

But in the last few years there HAVE been a few documented observations of rapid evolution.

Answer 8

They haven't. Evolution is usually an extremely slow process.A few thousand years are nothing in this time scale.
It can be accelerated by unusual events like selective breeding as man has done with the wild dog (Canis familiaris) to produce all different breeds for different jobs.

Answer 9

Yes and we have the same amount of chromosones as monkeys. There is the philosophy that regards this (46 & 2) as the next step in evolution.
Did you know a cow is closer in relation to a whale than a horse!
Absolutely true.

Answer 10

it happened for the same reason the mountains stopped growing, and the stars stopped burning down. in other words it didn't stop, it is just a very slow process, almost indistinguishable from stasis by humans. also, there is no reason to suppose that apes would evolve into humans - apes have evidently evolved into humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans, gibbons... humans are just one of many possible products of the process.

Answer 11

who says they have?

there are physical and mental evolutionary traits.
that is why today's humans know more than cavemen

squirels for instance have learned to shake and slap their tails on the ground to fool predators (with good memories and poor eye sight) into thinking they are rattle snakes.

tigers now know to only attack people from behind and some are no longer being fooled when people wear backward masks.

evoling is not just physical charasteristics, it a species getting smarter.
humans at one time didn't even have a neo-cortex. (hence why its called 'neo') things change on the inside as well