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.
Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.
If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.
Statistics is the grammar of science.
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
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