The Monkey Business of defining Monkeys

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The non-essentialism (or fuzziness of boundaries) entailed by modern Evolutionary biology is mind-boggling. I've had a strong interest in evolutionary biology since the fourth grade and one of the common misconception I had fun over the years correcting was that "humans evolved from monkeys". Particularly, the notion that "if humans evolved from monkeys, why are their still monkeys today" - a claim comical in it's lack of grasp. I would go on to display factual pedantry - correcting them that we didn't really evolve from monkeys, we just share a common ancestor with them. Foolish people!

Then I hit a conceptual snag in this line of taxonomic pedantry - one for which I was still someone constrained and baffled due to the ridigity of my concepts, what Dawkins calls the "discontinuous mind" (http://www.godslasteraar.org/assets/ebo ... e_Mind.pdf). Namely speaking, if there were species we called "monkeys" 47 million years ago like Apidium that we, other apes, and present day monkeys evolved from, why was it wrong to say "humans evolved from monkeys" and how come we (and other apes) stopped being monkeys while New World and Old World Monkeys remained monkeys? I toyed with the idea that perhaps a faster rate of mutuations or morphological change meant we lost the "essential characters of monkeyness" while New and Old world monkeys remained more stangant, but this idea really didn't seem supported by the data and was just plain fishy (and horribly ad hoc).

Eventually, the elegant solution to this problem forced itself into my stubborn, categorically rigid, mind: "monkeys" is a nearly useless folk concept.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igq_niFmXNs[/youtube]

If someone wants to move this to the Science board, that's okay. I view it as more philosophy of biology, but such a move would just go to strengthen the general thesis of non-essentialism in classification systems (i.e. there really is no non-arbitrary way to say whether this is a biology thread or a philosophy thread that treads on biological territory).

Cladistically speaking: All humans are apes, but not all apes are humans. All apes are monkeys, but not all monkeys are apes. In that sense humans not only evolved from monkeys; humans ARE monkeys still! Go back far enough and we are highly derived fish. There is much evidence of many different types that clearly show this happened.

Oh that's one of my favourite youtube videos. Aronra talks sense.
If you keep going back far enough through our evolutionary history you'll find all sorts of creatures like shrews, and a type of reptile and you'll go way back to single celled life forms. So we came from bacteria at first, yet coming from (prehistoric) monkeys is the one people focus on when describing why evolution puts them off. So when some creationist comes out with "so are you saying I'm related to a monkayy??" you could just say "yes and everything else on earth, you stupid fish."

It has recently been discovered that human cells are outnumbered in the human body by bacteria. So obviously we are bacterial colonies. Perhaps God created Eve, not from Adam's rib, but from a crumb of Roquefort cheese.

Ah I just realised, according to this video my username is actually quite accurate.

Part of it is in fact stiff conceptualization.

I used to point out to my students the counterintuitive fact: the distance between a phonologically and morphologically conservative language like Modern Icelandic and ProtoGermanic is exactly the same as the distance between Pitcairnese and ProtoGermanic. You cannot say this [living] language is older than that.

A modern lemur is the same distance [in time, generation distance will vary] from the Father of All Lemurs as we [assuming for argument what we might not assume in a different argument]. Every few generations the International Council of Cockroaches [true rulers of the planet] takes a vote and decides, why change? We are lords of creation as we are. While our putative ancestors [who unfortunately do not include any cockroaches] every few generations concluded we could be improved upon.

But this - like the earth going around a wimpy minor star - is hard for the brain to process without a lot of kneading.

ditto

We are apes. I think some people are like chimps and some are like bonobos. I'm a bonobo; a peaceful vegetarian. Chimps are like the aggrandizers that want to take over the world. I think the "killer gene" comes from the chimp lineage or whatever common ancestor we have with them. The gay gene comes from the bonobo ancestor. Feel free to steal my hypothesis if you can prove it. It would be cool to have humans in the ape family.

Pretty much.

" I think some people are like chimps and some are like bonobos."

While I suspect from its tone that some of the reportage on the Bonobo way may require a wee pinch of salt, the Chimpanzee / Bonobo divide is in my opinion [I do NOT say humble opinion, cause if you know me you know I ain't] extremely important for understanding some phenomena in human existence.

In saying this I take no stance on the type, degree, or implication of Chimpanzee - Bonobo - Human relationship.

Tolerance is one of the things that separates them. http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/downloads/hare2007.pdf


http://www.pnas.org/content/106/7/2118.abstract

Wars have played a big part in human evolution. It seems likely to me that we have this "warrior gene" because of rape and genocide from generations that spawned this current race of people. The peaceful humans get killed and tolerance gets bred out of the gene pool.

I would take issue with that. While we can't really begin to talk outside the boundaries of written language [and it is not always clear there], I think we can show that the ratios tolerant / intolerant, compassionate / sadistic, leader / follower, inquiring / accepting, introverted / extraverted, and so forth are actually pretty constant over time. Not to say that cultures and other collectives do not emphasize one over another - they for sure do.

But I think both those who say humanity is evolving into a kinder, gentler race and those who hold that we are breeding ourselves colder and sicker are wrong.

Though I do hold that the totally unnatural cave culture of Civilization, including both slum ridden cities and manicured suburbs, has put an often intolerable strain on people which turns them mean - but I don't believe it is inbred.

The notion that Humans are a species of Great Apes seems trivally true to me, yet the notion that Great Apes are a subset of Monkeys is greatly counterintuitive. It runs contrary to how I've preceived and conceptualized of the group "Great Apes" for my entire life.

Hm. My impulse is to say that it is still inaccurate to class us as "fish." The various fish lineages have continued to evolve after our line diverged from it. We just have to go a little farther down their branch to find the appropriate spot to cut off a monophyletic "fish" group.

Going back to what I think I perceive is one of the oints bundled in Master Pedant's original post, in taxonomy pretty much you pays your money and you takes your choice. Even with the move into Cladistics [which I would understand btter if my brother would talk to me], which gives the impression of taking taxonomy out of "looks like a duck" impressionism, there are going to be [I will just betcha] places where to make a binary cut [have you any idea how resistant taxonomy in various disciplines is to NON-binary divisions?]. you have to flip a coin.

From what little I understand, cladistics is supposed to spot the last ancestor where a human fruitfully mated with a chimp or a bonobo. What if in the full moon in July many years ago an incipient human impregnated [consensually or otherwise] a chimp to be whose mate was down at the motel with an attractive and willing proto-bonobo? Most taxonomists are going to impose a binary structure on that sort of thing.

I have elsewhere mentioned the info from my brother that his gang picked a point on the continuum from sludge to Superman and said "Chemicals above this point are living, below this point they are non-life.

Continua are the meat and the bane of taxonomy, and I am much happier when there is a stretch of no exemplars between Celtic languages and Italic languages, for instance.

The categories are fuzzy - and will be fuzzy. When they are not [THIS IS INTENDED TO BE HUMOROUS] scaly.

Interestingly enough, it seems the ancestors of humans mated with the ancestors of chimps for about a million years after the populations first started diverging. Evidence from human DNA and chimp DNA indicates this is a likely possibility, and it also fits in with what we know about how hybrid species develop. The first split from a common ancestor was about six or seven million years ago, but there was interbreeding between proto-humans and proto-chimps for another million years or so after that. I think it is hilarious that our ancestors were getting it on having wild monkey sex with chimpanzee ancestors for a million years!

The thing to understand is that individuals don't evolve, populations do. The early humans and early chimps were still similar enough to each other to find each other attractive and interbreed. They probably shared the same environment and even lived amongst each other.

Nope. I think human beings are fish.