colby@bu-bio.bu.edu (Chris Colby) (12/19/90)
In article <37034@cup.portal.com> mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson) writes: >The professor of the course had a table summarizing many experiments with >other species, showing a rise in information transfer as you go up the scale >to humans, who (by this measure) can assimilate hundreds of bits per second. Mark, I liked your post but I cringed when I read the above. The idea that evolution is a linear scale with humans at the pinnacle is simply not true. Other animals are not "lower" animals as you call them, just divergent. For example, chimps are the most closely related species to us. But, they are not a lower species. We did not evolve from chimps, we share a common ancestor with them. If you look at the topography of evolutionary history, you will see it resembles a tree or bush. Each extant species at the tips coalescing back into the ancestral species they diverged from. From a single common ancestor life multiplied and species diverged into many branches. It was not a march of progress with human beings being the goal. Extant (living) species are not our ancestors, we share a common ancestor with them. they have been evolving right along with us. The idea of evolution as a scale probably come from people wanting to view evolutionary change as progress. Evolution is not progress. It is just change. Organisms adapt to their current environments and that's it. Humans may be the most intelligent species on the planet, but we are not the pinnacle of evolution. Chris Colby email: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu