(March 27, 2014 at 9:30 am)Thunder Cunt Wrote: So why did these more advanced apes go extinct but Gorillas and Chimps did not?There could be a number of reasons. Possibly a cataclysmic event, like the meteor strike that hastened the end of the dinosaurs (and appears to have changed the climate sufficiently that it would no longer support such enormous land animals). Or disease, or famine, or some other environmental factor that affected their fitness for survival.
Man can be described as an advanced ape, but drop us in the middle of the ocean and we won't last very long. It is estimated that more than 99.8% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. So that is part of the process, it seems; the life on the planet evolves and changes as the planet itself undergoes change.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
