• Question: How did we ever start as animals?

    Asked by natrualme to Jemma, John, Lisa, Sam, Katie, David, Mus, Tess, Yue on 22 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by parthu, kookieboi.
    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 22 Jun 2012:

      Hi @naturalme,

      I would argue that we still are animals – we certainly aren’t insects, or plants.

      Jemma

    • Photo: John Perry

      John Perry answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi @naturalme,

      another good question. Here’s a great stat coutesy of Richard Dawkins:

      If you took a phtograph of yourself and placed it on the floor, then took a photograph of your mum and placed it on top of the first photo, then placed a photo of your grandad on top of that and so on…

      By the time had a pile of photographs 400 times the height of a New York skyscraper, you would have a photo of a fish.

      If we kept going, the photos of the fish would become less developed life forms. The really fascinating thing is that if you were to compare each of these pics to the one directly before and after it, they would look like the same species. Evolution is such a slow process, but a huge one.

      John

Comments

  • Photo: jbiddles

    jbiddles commented on :

    @Jemma Ransom – insects are animals, and humans are as well. Naturalme might mean how we “started out” as animals. In this case the answer is that groups of the species that were our ancestors evolved gradually over time until they split off from the original species due to different environments, eventually ending up as people.