Idiot of the Week: Hershel Walker: "If Humans Descended from Apes, Why are there still Apes?"

 You just can't make this stuff up. Here's another Idiot that obviously doesn't believe or choose to understand science. No surprise he's running for office, too. UGH. This moron has no idea how evolution and species branch out. After all, dog parents know that dogs branched out from other species like wolves, coyotes, etc. and we still have wolves and coyotes. SIGH. Here's the story about this week's idiot>>>

Hershel Walker: "If Humans Descended from Apes, Why are there still Apes?"

(CNN) March 15, 2022 

Herschel Walker apparently isn't much of an evolution buff.

"At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?" Walker, the frontrunner for the Georgia Republican Senate nomination, said in an appearance over the weekend at a church in Sugar Hill, Georgia. "If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it." Um, ok. I will.

So, here's the deal: Humans and apes evolved from the same genetic ape ancestors, a species now long extinct. (It's known as "common descent.") We did not, however, evolve directly from the current occupants of your local zoo. They are one branch of descent from their ape ancestors. Humans are another.

According to a Discover Magazine article published last month: "While we share our ancestry with these animals, along the way, over millions of years, we all changed. ... It's believed that this human divergence from the chimpanzee lineage of apes happened between 9.3 and 6.5 million years ago."

"[We] each adapted to our own environments or specific circumstances or niches," Zachary Cofran, a biological anthropologist at Vassar College, told Discover.

Or, as Fabio Mendes, an evolutionary biologist, wrote in a 2017 blog post for the University of Indiana: "Because two or more new species always originate from an ancestor species (and this process has been occurring since the origin of life), any two species we observe in the present are related. The truth might hurt, but yes, humans and chimpanzees are (distant) relatives. And so are blue whales, white sharks, sequoia trees, mushrooms, flies, earthworms, bacteria, etc. They are all relatives of yours." In short: Evolution doesn't work in a linear fashion.