Humans' and baboons' common ancestor

[Gian]

I've just heard Richard Dawkins saying that one individual (a zillion years ago) had 2 children. One is the ancestor of baboons, the other the ancestor of humans.

Would all the subsequent evolution of the 2 species have to be descended from literally that one single creature? Or could it have been several such creatures, even hundreds, who all had 2 such children each?

Cheerz

GIAN🙂XXX

Edited February 2 by Gian

[iNow]

You heard wrong.

[Endy0816]

Maybe that was meant in terms of mitochondria.

It's estimated that we need at least 500 people to be viable as a species. Having more than 2 children was the average historically.

Edited February 4 by Endy0816

[exchemist]

On 2/2/2024 at 2:18 PM, Gian said:

I've just heard Richard Dawkins saying that one individual (a zillion years ago) had 2 children. One is the ancestor of baboons, the other the ancestor of humans.

Would all the subsequent evolution of the 2 species have to be descended from literally that one single creature? Or could it have been several such creatures, even hundreds, who all had 2 such children each?

Cheerz

GIAN🙂XXX

Yes you must have misunderstood, I think. It is populations of organisms that evolve, collectively, rather than single individuals spawning a whole new species. If it were the latter it could only happen by extreme in-breeding, which we know doesn't work out well.   

[Ken Fabian]

I think it is an oversimplification - or at least the quoted bit without the context and explanation of what that means could be misconstrued.

Yes, some individual critter was a common ancestor of both baboons and humans, but it was not their only ancestor (or even only pair of ancestors). Their progeny would be a lot more like the parents and parent population than like baboons or humans and I would expect generations of "common ancestors" for each to coexist and for some of (and possibly all of) their progeny to also be common ancestors of both later lines. A whole lot of evolution would be still to come, including some cause for divergence into separate populations.

[CharonY]

13 hours ago, exchemist said:

Yes you must have misunderstood, I think. It is populations of organisms that evolve, collectively, rather than single individuals spawning a whole new species. If it were the latter it could only happen by extreme in-breeding, which we know doesn't work out well.   

Well, not only that, it also takes time and genetic isolation between populations. Even extreme inbreeding would not result in genetic isolation within a generation (or at least I cannot think of a scenario at the top of my head).

[sethoflagos]

8 hours ago, CharonY said:

Well, not only that, it also takes time and genetic isolation between populations. Even extreme inbreeding would not result in genetic isolation within a generation (or at least I cannot think of a scenario at the top of my head).

Dawkins has used hypothetical cases such as this as a reductio ad absurdum criticism of the Linnaean classification system. In particular, that intermediate evolutionary forms must be shoehorned into either a parent or daughter species at some arbitrary single point mutation event. 

The reality is of course, that genetic isolation etc allow the transition to occur over many generations of intermediates.

The OP is simply an attention seeking gross misrepresentation of Dawkins' argument.