/lit/ - Literature

>>22087259
>If we came from apes why are there still apes?
Are you familiar with the concept of forking? Things can diverge and change differently over time.
>Why wouldn't all creatures evolve to reproduce asexually?
Sexual reproduction is a rather efficient setup that allows for gene shuffling to prevent evolutionary stagnation. This is extremely useful when bacteria and fungi are constantly trying to find ways to fuck up your body for their own benefit.
>And if it were random mutations that passed on via natural selection and we for now just accepted the proposed timeframe did work out, why wouldn't animals find an area, plateu in evolution and adapt to only their surroundings, a change in environment wiping them out?
Most of the Tree of Life has been pruned off and is completely missing from the fossil record. And there are some biases in the "random" part of mutations. Many mutations will just lead to self-termination of the cell, which reduces the possible permutations. There are also redundant codons that work practically the same, allowing for some of the errors to be smoothed over. Some organisms have managed to be so stable in their environment, that they've barely changed at all in millions of years.
>Why isn't every species besides those harder to kill ones like insects still alive after all this time?
Most species that have ever been alive have gone extinct. You don't necessarily have to be hard to kill, you just have to stick around in conditions that aren't likely to kill you faster than you can reproduce.
>If that is the case, why are there still apes when we evolved?
Have you seen the muscles on a chimp? They just specialized in different stats.
>If now God created life, where did it come from
We've found the materials for life on all sorts of meteorites and RNA can spontaneously form on basalt glass under the right conditions. Lipid bi-layers form on their own, so cell membranes are the easy part. Once you get some kind of chemical replicator going, it just has to keep doing its thing, with minor changes in the replication process iterating up over billions of years.
>We have never seen something come from nothing
The materials were there. It's just a matter of them being arranged in such a way that they create more of themselves from the available materials.