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.
I think the next century will be the century of complexity.
The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.
Having been the discoverer of many splendid things, he is said to have asked his friends and relations that, after his death, they should place on his tomb a cylinder enclosing a sphere, writing on it the proportion of the containing solid to that which is contained.
I remember it was hard to believe that I was taking a step onto the lunar surface.
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