Humans evolved from monkeys

[The Grand Nudger]

Doubtful.  It's more likely that he's a christian who believes in evolution™. Subtle but common deceit from that camp.

[Old Baby]

Tell him that we evolved from fish.

The whole idea of evolving from monkeys is false in itself because it suggests that this was the starting point as well as making people think of modern day monkeys rather than a common primate ancestor. So telling him that humans, monkeys, apes and everything else also evolved from fish will put the whole process into a larger prospective.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13278255

Basically don't let him dictate the argument. He's arguing about a definition, i.e. of monkey. What's important is an understanding about how evolution works.

It wasn't really an argument so much as badgering.  He just appeared in another conversation I was having and started sending about 10 tweets for my every 1 saying "WE DID TOO EVOLVE FROM MONKEYS-I'M WAITING FOR YOUR SOURCES".  Everything I replied with, he pretty much ignored.  If it weren't for the fact that I actually wanted to know if I was wrong, I would have just blocked him.  In fact, I did mute him for a while and he continued to tweet me for about 15 minutes after I stopped replying.

I finally said that I was talking about extant monkeys and he was like "No one said anything about extant monkeys but you.  You said we didn't evolve from monkeys!"  So, I read his sources and this thread and admitted that I had learned something, that extinct monkeys were indeed in our ancestry.  He stopped replying.

[Old Baby]

Doubtful.  It's more likely that he's a christian who believes in evolution™.  Subtle but common deceit from that camp.

Well, I looked at some tweets where he was arguing with other Christians about evolution so I think he was the real deal.  He also says he will immediately block all Jews and that the bible is evidence of itself.

[The Grand Nudger]

At least you got rid of him..but we still didn't evolve from monkeys, nor are monkeys in our ancestry.  We share an ancestor with monkeys, but -that- ancestor was prosimian (meaning: before monkeys, literally)  

Think current day lemurs (except not current day lemurs, lol).  That some christard ignorantly decides to call any primate that isn't an ape a monkey doesn't say much about atheists or their knowledge of evolution.  Says wonders about his knowledge of classification, and his "college source", though. Monkeys are a concurrent branch of primate development, not a linear branch of human ancestry. To use the analogy from before, whereas chimps are our cousins...monkeys would be an aunt or an uncle from a different line.

The "real deal" again, from that perspective is slightly different than what you or I or an evolutionary biologist would describe as evolution. The common feature between the two is likely to be the word and the word alone.

[Old Baby]

Isn't it merely a matter of what you call "monkey" though? Would not these extinct primates be considered monkeys if they lived today?

I need to find a source somewhere that will break this down for a newb like me without making my brain explode.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Yeah it's just arguing about definitions.

[The Grand Nudger]

No, it isn't.  A prosimian is no more a monkey than you or I.  They are a prosimian.  In the same way that a lemur and a baboon are not the same thing, or a chimp and a human. We all share a common ancestor, we have shared attributes, we're all primates...........only one of them, however, is a monkey..the baboon.

To bring it into more contrast, to say that we're arguing over definition would be to say that claiming that the sun and a light bulb were different is only arguing over definitions. Perhaps, trivially, true...depending on the specifics...but substantially and demonstrably false by any reasonable or scientific standard. That asshat, let's recall, was "schooling" people on evolution™.

@Oldbaby, a source? Try wiki, for starters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate

Particularly the diagram, first section after the introduction. You'll notice that there aren't any monkeys in our branch of the "tree". Even "modern day" prosimians are distinct, genetically and ancestrally, from those prosimian ancestors we shared....themselves divided into subgroups.

[Minimalist]

[Aractus]

But his point specifically is that we did evolve from monkeys.  The word "monkey" is very important because he's a theist schooling atheists who he says don't actually know anything about evolution.  I've found many sites that explain that humans did not evolve from monkeys, but he won't accept any source unless it's a science journal or equivalent.

We didn't evolve from monkeys, and it's not entirely accurate to say we evolved "from apes" either because as SC pointed out we are technically a sub-species of Ape, and all apes living today (us included) evolved following different evolutionary pathways. And we're all contemporary species. No contemporary species evolved from another, they evolved from a now extinct ancestor. And we don't know what that ancestor was, but we do know it certainly wasn't a modern ape or monkey. We evolved into apes, not from apes.

We share a common ancestor with chimps, and they are our closet living ancestral relatives. But we didn't evolve from them, and they didn't evolve from us, we both evolved from some ancient life-form along two distinct evolutionary pathways. We don't know what the ancestor was, we don't know precisely how long ago it was (it could have been 7 million years, it could even have been 13 million years), the only thing we know is that it evolved into humans and it evolved into chimps over a period of at least 7 million years.

[Whateverist]

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.