I was all smug in my apeness. I loved to get the opportunity to outsmug the next smugnuts…
Dummy: “If we are evolved from apes, how come there are still apes?!”
Smugnuts: “Well, actually, we aren’t evolved from apes…it’s just that apes and humans have a common ancestor.”
Me, with the smuggest nuts: “Well, actually, humans ARE apes.”
It made me feel smart to say that. I had scientists who were much smarter than me try to explain it to me with different articles and videos, and I thought I had a basic grasp of it, even though I don’t really understand Taxonomy and Phylogenetics very well, I trusted that the scientists knew their shit on this one, and I ran with it.
Now, I find out that this cat John Hawks has the smuggest nuts of all! He is saying that actually, we AREN’T apes. Can someone help a sista out? I need the straight dope.
“Apes” is not a legitimate clade if we don’t include humans. But if we are talking about casual “folk” taxonomy, then the lower limb, hip, and back adaptations that humans display are sufficiently modified to consider them as distinct from the other apes. (But, I also think that gibbons and orangs should also be considered distinct, due to their arm development.)
Come to think of it, I realize I don’t believe in “apes” at all.
If you are a cladist, you cannot call chimps and gorillas apes without calling humans apes. Chimps and gorillas are not a clade, distinct from humans. You could put chimps and humans in a clade without gorillas, if you so chose.
Your link is just arguing that “ape” is not a scientific term. This is analogous to “whale”. Are orcas “whales”? Well, yeah in common language, but they are a type of dolphin or toothed whale in scientific terms.
And the problem with “ape” is that it’s not a clade, either, since Old World monkeys are more closely related to “apes” than they are to New World monkeys. In that sense, if you insist that humans are apes, you kinda sorta have to agree that we are monkeys, too.
But I’ll top there. There are some types of fish that are more closely related to humans than they are to other fish. Does that make humans fish?
Bottom line, though, this is all semantics and no one is objectively right. It all depends on how one defines one’s terms. Me, I’m comfortable with calling humans “apes” because we look enough like them that it makes sense. We look as much like a chimp as a Mexican Hairless looks like a Great Dane, and both of the latter are “dogs”.
If we accept the common definition of “ape”, then our common ancestor with the extant apes would have been an ape, no matter if we are talking great apes or lesser apes. So, yes, we are evolved from “apes” (an ape species, actually).
We did not evolve from an extant ape species, if that is what you meant.
Hahaa! You flatter me. I have no idea what ‘extant ape’ means, so that’s not what I meant.
Thanks guys for helping me out here. I’m looking stuff up now. I’m still confused though. Like Dr. Fidelius, I’m beginning to wonder if I believe in apes at all. Maybe I should stop counting the basketball passes.
ETA: Acsensray, the problem is, I kinda got myself into a ‘scientific’ conversation with someone and I am a bit over my head. Ok, a lot over my head. So I really wanted some clarity.
No, I was assuming we all understood the genetics, and that we do look enough like chimps that it makes sense to call both species “apes”.
BP: The scientific classification for “ape” is Hominoidae. But biologists only have an official group that sanctions the species definition, at least for vertebrates, not all the other taxa. They are what people agree they are (or don’t agree, as the case may be).
Human beings are genus Homo, of which Homo sapiens are the only extant species. Genus Homo is a part of family Hominidae, which also contains contains all of the other extant great apes; chimpanzees (Pan), orangutans(Pongo), and gorillas (Gorilla), as well as their extinct familia.
There is not a strict taxonomic definition of “great ape” (which is the point that Mr. Hawks seems to be making), so one can define H. sapiens as being distinct from the other members of Hominidae, e.g. as hominids (members of tribe Homininae), but any cladistic approach is still going to define them as being at least derived from the common origin of all other great apes, and distinguished only by relatively minor variations of planform, though it should be appreciated the cumulation of those distinctions, such as upright stature and plantigrade locomotion are highly significant in terms of our particular evolution, and in particular the development of higher cognitive and advanced tool making ability, which does justify a significant distinction at some level.
In terms of social behavior, the distinctions between H. sapiens and the other members of Hominidae are surprisingly minor; the same basic social structures and interactions observed in the other great apes, particularly bonobos and common chimps, are also present in primitive (tribal-level) human societies. When people refer to humans as also “apes” this is (consciously or otherwise) this is generally the context of their statement. However, Hawks is taxonomically justified in making the distinction between apes and hominids.
Correction: Instead of “ape”, I should have said “monkey”. “Ape”, as commonly used in English, and when including humans, is a clade, but “monkey” isn’t. Or it can be, since lots of people seem to call apes monkeys.
The only way you could argue that humans aren’t apes is to say that there’s no such thing as “apes”. If Chimps are apes, and Gorillas are apes, and Orangutans are apes, then Humans have to be apes.
Same thing with “monkey”. If spider monkeys are monkeys, and baboons are monkeys, then apes have to be a kind of monkey too, because baboons are more closely related to apes than they are to spider monkeys.
Of course the problem is that our everyday English words for animals and types of animals doesn’t follow scientific information about how animals are related to each other, but is typically much older. So it turns out that there is no such thing as “zebras”. There are three species of zebra, the plains zebra, the mountain zebra, and Grevy’s zebra. But Grevy’s zebra is more closely related to donkeys than it is to the other two zebras. So “zebra” isn’t a scientific cladistic term, it just means any kind of horse that has stripes. Different species in the horse family have evolved stripes, but having stripes together doesn’t make them close relatives. If we wanted “zebra” to have phylogenetic validity we’d either have to declare that Grevy’s zebra isn’t really a zebra even though it’s a striped horsey, or that pretty much all horsey things are zebras.
