Ouch, you tripped me up there, and you’re right that I used the wrong group name. But it doesn’t really change my argument any (and it’s clear that you are still completely confused about what my argument is), and of course you used it as an excuse to dodge everything else I said.
But given that I made a mistake, I’ll drop the snark. I really think you’ve haven’t paid attention to what this thread is actually about, and thus have completely mistaken my position.
To recap: the OP suggests that we recast all group names so that they are basically monophyletic, either changing or eradicating terms that don’t conform to any actual distinct lineage.
It’s a nice idea, but, as I said when I first posted, it has a lot of practical problems. Monkey was the example I picked, because monkey is NOT a monophyletic term (do you at least agree with that?) Why isn’t monkey a monophyletic term? Because Haplohrrhini (or the Simiiformes if we want to be even more specific and care about excluding the tarsiers, which are generally ignored anyway) are not generally called monkeys, but things in two different splits amongst the Simiiformes ARE called monkeys. New world primates and Old World primates was the first major division among the Simiiformes, and apes are from the Old World branch. That means that we end up having monkeys on BOTH sides of that split, which means that “monkey” is not a good monophyletic group (it’s polyphyletic), whether genetically or otherwise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphyletic
So the lowest grouping that contains all creatures that we call monkeys is Haplohrrhini (or the less well known Simiiformes to be more exact I guess). The logic of the OP requires that we either ditch “monkey” altogether or “fix” it, and the only way to fix it is to extend it so that it becomes truly monophyletic (i.e. a group that includes a common ancestor and ALL of its descendants) while still encompassing everything that was thought of as a monkey.
But this would make apes monkeys.
Now, here is were you got all bent out of shape. APES AREN’T MONKEYS. Well, yes. But remember what the OP was about! It was about should we and what would happen if we messed around with those terms to make them strictly conform to phylogenetic groups.
Monkey was my example of one of the screwups we’d encounter under this sort of rule. A more dramatic example is fish: if we tried to keep the word “fish” under this scheme, we’d have to call people fish. And dolphins. And birds. Or throw out the term fish altogether. And so my position was that we’d never get people to adopt that sort of scheme.
Now you: you blew in here apparently unaware of the subject of the thread. You seemed to have just read my post and assumed that I was claiming that it was a fact that apes were definately monkeys.
That’s not my position. My position is that IF we had to adopt the strict group scheme, then apes would be monkeys. I don’t think that’s “wrong” or “meaningless” per se, because claiming that definitions are wrong or meaningless doesn’t make any sense: they are arbitrary, and we in this thread are discussing the utility of CHANGING definitions.
But the irony is that I AGREE that we probably can’t get people to conform to the strict scheme proposed by the OP, and this seems to be your position as well. And yet somehow, you managed to convince yourself otherwise, and launch into a diatribe about how apes aren’t right now defined as monkeys. And, unfortunately, for too long, I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you had actually read the OP and understood that we were talking about what would happen if we changed the definitions.