If evolution is real?

It's painfully obvious that you have no idea what evolution is and what it is not.....which makes your question hysterically funny LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     You might start by evolving yourself into a merman.  I mean, what potential mermaid would want to evolve into a world without mermen?

     And BTW, mermen are known to have low IQ's, so it looks like you have a head start in that direction.

Why are there both?  Because the branching off happened way before then?  So 2 or more branches grew side by side each developing its own set of skills. 

Which is why we still have fish. Because all life originated in the oceans.  Now I am talking a REALLY long time ago.

check on YT for  "aaronRa"  He has numerous videos that is all factual stuff. (yeah, double "a")

. Same question ...if burros existed, why do we have donkeys and horses?  Same tree branching thing.

. Nothing you can do in 1 lifetime and you want to go with Narwhales as they have pointy swords.

*why are there still monkeys

Because there are some places where being a monkey works pretty well, and we haven't killed all the monkeys yet.

*and no mermaids

That's an evolutionary history thing.  None of the hominins found living in the ocean to be a compelling lifestyle.

*achieve mermaids

You would need to select only those humans who had characteristics that would be desirable in mermaids, and reproductively isolate them from the rest of humanity.  You would continue the selection process over a period of, say, ten million years.

It might not work.  Livebearing penguins, for example, would have a huge advantage over egg-laying, yet no birds have ever given live birth.  Ditto sea turtles.

There are still monkeys (cladistically we are ourselves monkeys but that's confusing) because the ecological niches they occupy are still there and they fit them quite well.  If you look at West Afrika, there's a river separating bonobos and chimpanzees and they became different species because they couldn't cross it and interbreed. Something similar would've happened with our common ancestors.  Evolution is not progress and intelligence may even be harmful because it leads to a long childhood and a lot of attention from the community, and also small litter sizes.  If we survive long enough, we could probably genetically engineer mermaids (and mermen of course, unless we make them non-binary or parthenogenic) but we'll doubtless go extinct instead.  It's thought that dugongs may have given rise to the legend of mermaids, along with possibly birth defects.

PS:  'Οικος, I disagree.  I think it would be a selective advantage for an intelligent marine mammal to have hands with opposable thumbs.

There are still monkeys for the same reason that there are still Europeans, even though white Americans' ancestors came from Europe.

We and modern monkeys are cousins - we share a common ancestor (though one that looked much more like modern monkeys than modern humans).  Modern species don't evolve into other modern species.  As for mermaids, why would they have come about?  Evolution doesn't aim for a specific result, in this case intelligent bipedal sea breathers.  Our ancestors had no need to establish lives underwater, and it's awfully hard to evolve gills *in addition* to lungs.  Lungs, I think, came out of gills (or what became gills), so we'd have to develop a whole separate new portion of our breathing system, which is much harder to do than modifying something existing.

The only way I can see us heading toward mermaids would be through genetic engineering - but you'll have to wait a few decades before that becomes anywhere near feasible.

Ignorance is both forgivable and curable. Stupidity is not. But I like a challenge.

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Briefly, we did not evolve from monkeys (although the similarity of them and some of the YA users IS remarkable) but from apes that are now extinct.

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Secondly, what would be gained from being the  "ultimate species on land and sea"? Mutations only persist if they carry some selective advantage. Mer-people would not.

It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun.

The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution.

- R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, op cit.