Humans evolved from monkeys

[Aractus]

What a mess.  We didn't evolve directly from creatures which would fit the modern description of monkeys to what we call humans without, along the way, evolving into creatures who fit the modern description of apes (but not of the specifically human kind).  He might just as well complain that we evolved from some more primitive creature with a rudimentary backbone.  Which we surely did .. along the way evolving into many distinctly different creatures which would meet the description of certain named categories.  I don't see any issue here.

Okay, well here's a different example then.

Take this creature:



It looks like a bird but it isn't, and it never became one through evolution either. It's a dinosaur, and it's name is Archaeopteryx. It lived 150 million years ago. Some people claim that it was transitional which is wrong because it didn't transition into a modern bird, it died out (though technically all theropoda dinosaurs were in a period of change from whatever they evolved from millions of years ago, but simply labelling it as being "transitional" is a gross oversimplification unless you recognising that ALL life is transitional which makes the term meaningless anyway). Birds evolved from other theropoda dinosaurs, and they evolved separately along different paths from different dinosaurs. Thus we have birds today that evolved from different dinosaurs, just as humans and other apes evolved from different "dinosaur" ancestors, but it just happens that we share a common ancestor with chimps sometime 7-14 million years ago. Birds would share common ancestors as well, of course, but not in the late Jurassic period. It's an example of convergent evolution - i.e. birds that are only distantly related to each other evolved similar features to each other (such as flight) independently of each other.