That’s the problem. Some mammals and some birds could just as easily be characterized as “cold blooded” (post #35). Besides, that very term is confusing (post #34). If you can’t see that, then I don’t think there is any more fruitful exchange we can have on the subject.
As for the other topic, I only wanted to emphasis that Linnaeus got it right (in a cladistic sense) for humans being mammals without knowing anything about the “ancestral history of life on earth.” He grouped things by shared physical characteristics, which happens to correltate fairly well with ancestry. So, it’s possible to imagine that we could also have gotten it “right” about the term monkey, in that humans could be called monkeys. I’m not sure how Linnaeus classifed monkeys and whether he created a super category of just monkeys and apes, so maybe he did get it right, in which case it would be even more puzzling why we still get stuck on that today.
I didn’t say anything about it being a good term and not being confusing or rigorously defining it as applying to all mammals and birds or whatever. My sole point in brining it up was as an example of a polyphyletic grouping.
You seem to have the same bizarre hard-on for arguing with people that aren’t disagreeing with you that Loopydude had. I mean seriously: that’s a nitpick of a nitpick of a nitpick of something only tangentially related to what I said.
Okay, but we didn’t. Or, at least not in the very strict sense that the OP is proposing we should define “right” as.
Well, if two people seem to be arguing with you over things you think they should agree on, then maybe it’s because you’re not expressing those things clearly. Did you ever think of that?
Sure, but having reviewed the evidence, I’ve concluded that Loopydude was confused by not having the context of the OP in mind and me not realizing that and trying to be too snarky to be clear, while on the other hand, you are just being pointlessly nasty and pedantic.
But hey, since the chances of an actual creationist coming into an evolution thread on the dope is next to nil, and the OP having seemingly vanished, what else CAN we do other than make up tedious ways to one-up each other at all costs?
Truth be told, I only got a little snarky after you seemed to have become snarky yourself (sheesh, I even apologized for not being clear in one of the first posts we exchanged). So, maybe we’re both not understanding each other.
I was thinking of the older definition of “hominid”, which included only humans and extinct fore-runners such as australopithecines. I see that some biologists now define it to include pongids as well, in which case it would be equivalent to great-apes-including-humans.
Regarding monkeys, my preferred solution would be to redefine the word down, so that it includes New World monkeys only. Old World monkeys will henceforth be cercopithecoids. My only reason for choosing the OWM’s to bump is that many are already known by other names, such as macaques or baboons.
The Barbary macaque, by the way, is an example of how the vernacular eventually catches up with science. When I was a kid, the things crawling around the Rock of Gibraltar were always (sic) Barbary apes. Now you don’t hear that much any more.
Bah! Birds are birds, not dinosaurs. Why use “dinosaur” for the whole clade? Why not just extend “bird,” then? :rolleyes: Dinosaurs are “thunder lizards,” if you want to be scientifically precise about the clade, you need a new term anyhow.
It’s silly to deny the usefulness of paraphylic & polyphylic terms. It’s as if a mathematician were saying there are no “rhomboids,” only “non-rhombus, non-rectangle parallelograms”.
I’m on the fence about “ape” referring to the clade or the paraphyly of apes other than humans. The ecology-altering stance of humans is pretty distinct, & linguistically, humans will demand a term for the “almost but not us.” But yeah, I think ape is a decent clade name, too.
Still, the self-important noise of those who call birds dinosaurs is a case of knowing more about biology than about linguistics.
They’re both! That’s the advantage of correct nomenclature; it doesn’t force you to make false choices. Birds are a type of dinosaur, a refinement of dinosaur-ness which didn’t go extinct along with the others.
Because then we’d need a new word for “bird”. The path of least resistance is to extend “dinosaur” downward and leave “bird” the same.
No, you just need to define the existing word correctly to include the ancestor and all descendants.
Certainly, there are times when one must refer to such groups: non-human apes, non-avian dinosaurs, non-amniotic tetrapods. I’m doing it with two words; why are two words better than one? Because they better match reality; to give non-human apes a one-word name obscures the fact that some branches of the ape tree are more closely related to humans than to each other. It reinforces an incorrect view of evolution as a succession of improvements (a “ladder of progress”, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it) rather than an alternation of radiation, specialization, and extinction.
The claimed strength of paraphyletic and polyphyletic terms: that they describe some “real” similarity on which we should base a group, is precisely their weakness. They lead people into putting too much weight onto or even false similarities, usually similarities that are only skin deep.
It’s tempting to say that there is something meaningful in the word “fish”: that it describes something fundamentally “fishy” that groups together lampreys, catefish, lungfish, the coelacanth, perch, and salmon and excludes, say, lizards. But when you get down to brass tacks, that’s just not the case: not genetically, not morphologically. The group ISN’T good: it’s just based on putting too much weight on some very gross and general features (like living primarily in the water) and not noting the vast diversity elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that STILL doesn’t mean that we are going to have much success in getting people to give up the word “fish.”
