Re: Is the animal a human? Does reading SF improve your ablity to cope with the quesitons on this post?

On 2003-11-26, Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Aaron Denney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote on Wed, 26 Nov 2003 06:44:08 +0000 (UTC):
>> On 2003-11-26, Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>   Bonobos, and all apes, are non-sapient.
>> I strongly suspect you mean "all non-human apes".
>
>   No, "ape" does not include genus Homo.

Depends a great deal on which taxonomist you ask, and perhaps more
importantly when -- lots of recent genetic evidence has forced some
restructuring of the classifications and cladograms.  It's not generally
used that way in common usage, because many humans don't want to be
considered apes.  But considering what the genetic results are telling
us, excluding human primates and our extinct relations from the ape moniker
is an awfully strange way of categorizing things.

Look at http://www.uvm.edu/~jdecher/Hominphyl.GIF, or 
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/agifs/Apecladogram.GIF
Hylobatidae, gibbons, are a apes, and branched off way before
gorillas and humans did.  If they and gorillas are apes, then humans
are by any reasonable standard.  Same for orangutans, definitely apes.

There have even been
recent moves to reclassify chimps and humans as the same _genus_ (previous
consensus was different families -- chimps in Pongidae with the rest
of the apes, aside from gibbons in Hylobatidae, and Humans in Hominadae)
see, e.g.  http://www.ludusvitalis.org.mx/palma2000/syst-english.html :

        In a later paper, Goodman and collaborators (Goodman et
        al., 1998) gave the category of only a subgenus (Homo homo)
        to the human clade, sharing the genus Homo with chimpanzees
        (Homo pan). Finally, Watson and collaborators (Watson, Esteal,
        & Penny, 1998) placed gorillas (Homo gorilla) also in the Homo
        genus.

> Humans are primates, but it's just plain wrong to call us "apes".

Not at all.  Any of the superfamily Hominoidea.

> Apes are a different branch from Proconsul.

We're not Proconsul last I checked -- all the Proconsulidae are extinct.

> It's not quite right to call chimps "apes", but that's common usage, too.

They're apes, both by common usage, and genetic links.

> Based on the evidence, Homo habilis was the first species in our
> ancestry that might possibly be called sapient, but we'd have to have
> a living specimen to be sure.  We really only know for sure with Homo
> sapiens.

Likely true.  I'm not arguing about whether any of the other apes are
sentient.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-