Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the relatively recent common ancestry of humans and chimpanzees from an evolutionary perspective.
Richard Dawkins emphasizes that the shared lineage between humans and chimpanzees is a recent event in evolutionary terms, occurring 5 to 7 million years ago. This suggests that our current understanding of evolution and our connections to other species are grounded in a deep but not ancient history, highlighting the dynamic and ongoing nature of evolutionary processes.
In practice
In a lecture on human evolution, this quote can illustrate our connection to other species.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.
Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.
It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.
One lesson astronomy tells us is that we're a tiny mote in a hostile void, and help is too far away.
It took them only an instant to cut of that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a singular one.
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