What I’m getting from this thread is that the only really correct answer is “It depends on how you define monkeys.”
I think it’s worth saying “yes, we are monkeys” because it’s a scientifically valid way of classifying things, it properly places us in the Great Tree of Life, and it challenges our unwarranted sense of separateness from “the animals”. I think the whole point of the general re-classification of the “hominids” is that if it were any species other than us it would be pretty much a no-brainer, given what we now know in terms of comparative DNA and so forth.
As far as “fish” goes, a proper classification of things does seem to produce some absurd results. Not only are we “fishes”, but so are all other terrestrial vertebrates. Lizards are fishes. Birds are fishes. Cows are fishes. Horses are fishes. (No, not these). Kittens are fishes. (OMG! PETA was right!) Whales are fishes after all!
I think we need to bite the bullet and admit that coelacanths aren’t really fishes. They’re “fish-like marine animals” or something, to be sure, but they’re more closely related to us than they are to the “true fishes”. Last common ancestor of us and coelacanths (Latimeria chalumnae) lived about 414 million years ago; LCA of coelacanths (and people, and cows, and so forth) and goldfish (Carassius auratus) lived about 432 million years ago. This would also mean that lungfish aren’t fishes, either. (How can lungfish not be fishes?!? Well, jellyfish, starfish, crayfish, and cuttlefish aren’t fishes either.)
Looking at the family tree for the “fishes”, you may also notice that by this logic it turns out sharks aren’t fishes either. Yep, goldfish are more closely related to us (LCA: approximately 432 million years ago) than they are to great white sharks, Carcharodon carcharias (LCA: approximately 465 million years ago). So, sharks (that is, the Chondrichthyes, including manta rays and so forth) aren’t “true fishes” either. Everyone knows that dolphins aren’t fishes, and neither were the icthyosaurs. So, now we would say that sharks aren’t fishes either.
Basically, I say we should confine the term “fish” (in a formal sense, anyway) to the Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fishes. According to Wikipedia, that’s nearly 99% of all the known species of fishes; most things you would think of as “fishes”, from minnows to marlins, would still count as fishes. We (terrestrial vertebrates, plus a few oddball “fish-like” marine forms), the “true fishes”, and the sharks and their relatives are all “gnathostomes” or vertebrates with jaws.
Hell, yes! We should just embrace this one, because it’s both scientifically valid and it makes the world so much cooler. In the Jurassic Park movies, they’re always nattering on about “What would happen if humans shared our world with dinosaurs?” It turns out that we would eat them. (With a special blend of 11 herbs and spices.) Some humans keep tame dinosaurs, which they use to hunt other dinosaurs!
“The majestic bald eagle, the national dinosaur of the United States…”
Oh yeah? Hold my beer.
I agree. I love the idea! I just think it’s one of those questions that cannot be answered with a short answer like the one given in the OP. It can if you’re trying to catch people up, but not if you’re trying to educate people who aren’t familiar with the science.
In case anyone hasn’t seen it, there’s an XKCD cartoon on this very topic:
A more interesting question is what would happen if we shared our world with megafauna dinosaurs? Well, we pretty well know the answer to that question, too: We’d hunt and eat them, even if we were somehow reduced to stone age technology.
In simple terms: Before humans came to New Zealand, there were Moa. After humans, there weren’t no Moa no mo’.
Yes, the Haast’s eagle is extinct as well. Its food source got hunted to extinction by something which was better at hunting than it was, and, guess what, a flying death dino couldn’t destroy all humans, either.
Dinosaurs can open doors? We can open a whole can of tool-using whoop-ass.
Now I want to know what question 6 on the BBC quiz that Jerry Coyne won’t discuss is.
The distinction between monkey and ape is not made in a number of languages that I know something of or have asked about: French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian and arose only a few hundred years ago in English. But if we are monkeys, then we are fish, we are bacteria. What is the point in such a claim. On the other hand we are evolved from ancestors of all them. It is more a semantic than scientific question.
Well, there’s the scientific accuracy of the “We are monkeys” claim, as discussed above. I also think another point to these discussions is that the popular notions of how to classify living things can reinforce false notions of who we are and how we (and all other life) came to be. There can be kind of a sense of:
“Once, there were fishes living in the sea. Most of them were lazy and unmotivated fishes, and they remain fishes to this day. But some of them were smarter and more adventurous (and had fins with a different bone structure to them) and THOSE fishes Conquered the Dry Land! And eventually, after going from fishes to amphibians to reptiles to little furry scurrying mammals to monkeys to apes, some of the apes Came Down From the Trees and became cave-men, until finally you get to us, Mankind, the Pinnacle of Life on Earth and the End-Goal of Evolution!”
But fishes (and all the rest of living things) aren’t the inferior slackers of Life on Earth which failed to have enough gumption to evolve into us. The ray-finned fishes are simply a different branch of the jawed vertebrates is all, and have been quite successful at the only “End-Goal” of evolution there is, which is making more fishes and continuing to pass on the instructions for making fishes. The goldfish is just as much the end product of 400+ million years of gnathostome evolution as we are.
Question 6 is the one about progress that is shown below the illustration of the cladogram showing the abundance of monkeys in our ancestory.
We are apes, which are a specialized branch of monkeys, which are a specialized branch of placental mammals, which are a specalized branch of synapsids, which are a specalized branch of amniotes, which are a specalized branch of amphibians, which are a specalized branch of lobe-finned fish, which are a specalized branch of cordates, which are a specialized branch of deuterostomes, which is a specalized type of nephrazoans, which is a specialized branch of bilateralans…each one of these is true, scientificly. (The hard part is marking limited but meaningful descriptions.)
As for bacteria, well, that is where it really becomes messy and neat cladograms break down–at that stage we are a merger of probably at a minimum two types of bacteria and possibly several including both bacteria and archaea. (Never mind all the many, many times viral DNA became integrated throughout evolutionary history.)
No, I am rejected this argument. The principle you’re trying to sell is that once a species exists, all subsequent species that evolve from it remain part of that ancestral species.
Which is nonsense. If it were true then there wouldn’t be any species; all living beings would all be part of one single ancestral species.
Yes, my ancestors were fish. But I am not a fish. That’s the whole point of evolution.
(Shrug) Reject it all you want, it will remain a fact. You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “species.” A species is an…um… specific group of very closely related organisms defined with a binomial name (first word capitalized, second word not, both italisized.) A clade is an ancesteral species that developed a specific trait *and every species that evolved from it. *“Fish” is not a species.
The principle I’m trying to sell is that once a clade exists, all subsequent species that evolve from it remain part of that ancestral clade. Saying that humans are apes, that humans are primates, that humans are mammals, and that humans are lobe-finned fish are exactly the same principle. You aren’t claiming that you aren’t an ape, a primate, or a mammal, are you?
I just noticed this thread. The following two posts (which do not contradict each other) are an eloquent statement of what I’d have posted:
The quiz question should have been avoided altogether; but if asked, ‘True’ is the best answer.
Right. It’s a paraphyletic typological classification. Which is why I’m not a fish.
But “lobe-finned fish” is monophyletic, which is why you are. And saying “I’m a sarcopterygian but not a lobe-finned fish” isn’t pedantry, it is self-contradictory. (Of course if it really bothers you so much to be considered a fish, you could settle for being called a eutelostome and saying that there is no such thing as a “fish.”)
Meh, there’s talk in my mom’s family about a Roman soldier in our ancestry. Doesn’t make me Italian.
Pretty cool if it’s true though.
This is not a remarkable claim for genealogical ancestry, which behaves very differently from genetic ancestry. Because we have two parents, four grandparents etc., the number of genealogical ancestors increases almost geometrically. Just a few thousand years ago, a large proportion of the population were genealogical ancestors of everyone alive today (and the rest were ancestors of nobody). Everyone’s set of genealogical ancestors is identical in the fairly recent past.
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature_NewsAndViews.pdf
Further to what Reimann posted, anyone with ancestry in Europe has some ancestry that would trace back to Rome. Same thing with being descended from Charlemagne (born in the 8th century). All Europeans. Seriously, it’s a completely unremarkable thing. That’s actually the cool part! 
The Identical Ancestor Point for Europeans is only about 1,000 year ago. So, for Europeans, you only have to go back about 1,000 years before you find the same set of common ancestors of every European alive today.
I still maintain that you’re pushing the concept of clade too far. Clade is not identity. Humans are part of the clade of fish but humans are not fish. (And I understand, before you raise the objection, that you’re saying those two statements are identical.)
In some cases clade and identity are identical. I can say that humans are mammals and monkeys are mammals and bears are mammals and squirrels are mammals. I’m fine with that because I can identify common characteristics that all of these species have. And in this case, the group of species that has the characteristics which define mammals also happens to be the same as the clade of mammals.
But that’s not always the case. I can define the characteristics which makes a species a fish. But there are numerous species which are in the clade of fish which are not in the group of species which do not have the characteristics of fish.
To use a more extreme example, all animals are in the clade of plants. But to say that humans are plants is to use the term plant so broadly that it’s rendered meaningless. I doubt you’re going to find many scientists who would agree that humans are plants. Most scientists recognize that there is a definition of what a plant is that’s more narrow than anything which is in the clade of plants.