Are we apes?

No retard, that doesn't apply here.
We have definitions to explain concepts.
Language is a tool used for communicating these concepts efficiently.
Humans fit the definition of ape.
Therefore, as per language, we are apes.

I'd also like to note, stop abusing argumentation theory by applying it where it isn't valid to apply it.

I'd also like to note, definitions are drawn from the majority, as without majority agreement, those definitions would be useless as no one would understand them. Thus making language useless with it.

We are Hominids which are great apes.

Your committing a category mistake. "Ape" is only applicable to animals, not to humans. Biology is about animals. For humans we have medical science. And no, I'm not denying that we evolved from animals.

>Doesn't think humans are animals.
>Pretends to know bunk about taxonomy.
We're done here.

When talking about "animals" we always implicitly exclude humans. Humans have rights, humans have civilization, humans have a lot of shit animals don't have. We evolved to be a new category.

Yes.

Can you define "animal" then?
What Kingdom do humans belong to?

Considering classification is biology, how have we biologically become different than all other living things?

Animals have rights in most countries, and some humans have no rights in others.

Humans don't belong to any "kingdom" because we don't belong into this classification which was made to classify all non-human organisms.

We evolved to be different.

Animals don't have rights and should not have righs.

>We evolved to be different.
Apparently you didn't, because you can't even read a basic sentence.

Please explain how BIOLOGICALLY we are different than other animals. Please tell me the actual biological reason we are "different." Saying we are different is not an argument.

If you say it's just the fact we evolved so did everything else, and by that same virtue we are closer to Chimps than Chimps are to Ants, so it makes no sense for Ants and Chimps to share a classification and us to not.

I expect a real fucking comment this time or you get an F.

Animals in America do have rights and whether they should or not is irrelevant because that is not what we are speaking about. Learn what an argument is.

depends what an ape is
STEMfags and normies think that question has been settled decisively but of course it really hasn't, it's a theoretical question which no empirical test can really answer
there's the simple level of uncertainty where the question if humans are apes is like the question if birds are dinosaurs, which only the cladistic theory of species answers in the affirmative
but there's a deeper level where there's a question if humans are even animals at all
you could argue the concept of an animal existed before darwin and applied to a large set of organisms, and that nothing thereafter has shown that we are any of those organisms; so the idea that humans are animals really depends on the argument that darwin et al showed that we are similar enough to those organisms to count as animals as well. and this argument can arguably be countered by observing how radically dissimilar humans are to those organisms, having sapience and all its products plus whatever special relation to divine or spiritual reality might exist

>ignorant and dogmatic
typical STEM

> should not
That's just your opinion.

Animals are:
- Multicellular, meaning they are made up of more than one cell.
- Eukaryotes, meaning their cells have a nucleus.
- Motile, meaning they are capable of moving under their own power and consume energy to do so.
- Heterotrophic, meaning they must consume other organisms or the products of other organisms in order to replenish that energy.

Humans are still all of those things. Humans are animals. The fact that we have evolved greater intelligence has not changed the underlying characteristics that make us animals.

Do you understand what an Animal means in scientific terms? Like the actual Kingdom Animalia a.k.a Metazoa

the problem is, if that notion of "animal" is unrevisable, then it is just stipulative
which means biologists have just invented a new term and aren't actually dealing with defining "animal"; they might as well have called their new term "beenimal"

but how do we know those traits are the ones that determine whether something is an animal?

Apes and humans have the same ancestors.

Only in the same sense that dogs are wolves.

Socially, probably further removed still. None of the primates we are most closely related to form nations the way we do - only extended families and small tribes. Baboons form nations, but they are pretty distant.

Still, the statement that "We are hairless apes with technology", while rough around the edges, isn't really incorrect.

Though you'd be just as far off if you said Dolphins are wolves that swim and chat a lot.

Cuz that's what we decided upon.

The separation between human and animal is more colloquial than scientific. You can claim sapience is the dividing line, but neither science nor philosophy has come up with a good definition of sapience that doesn't have various factors shared by a number of animals we generally consider non-sapient.

I suppose the other dividing line would be: "Would you kill and/or eat it?"

There is the legal definition, which humans don't fall under, but that's, similarly, only due to the way the definition is worded, "A creature or living thing, other than human, being able to move of its own accord."

So yeah, it's a pretty arbitrary meter, but biologically speaking, until there's a clean dividing line, we're animals, just, in many ways, very unusual ones.

>Cuz that's what we decided upon.
but this implies total anti-realism about biological classification
if what kind a creature belongs to is just something we "decide," kinds are basically fictional
>You can claim sapience is the dividing line, but neither science nor philosophy has come up with a good definition of sapience that doesn't have various factors shared by a number of animals we generally consider non-sapient.
that's just garden variety skepticism
there are plenty of things that are obviously true even though it is hard to say precisely how, in philosophical/scientific terms, we know them to be true, such as the existence of motion or the external world or other minds
there are obviously huge differences between humans and animals
>until there's a clean dividing line, we're animals, just, in many ways, very unusual ones.
but that's very easy to disagree with
firstly because non-essentialism is conceded about plenty of distinctions we still hold to be real
but especially since you concede that if we are animals we are "very unusual ones"--what defense do you have against somebody's insistence that this unusualness is strong enough to put us outside the category entirely? "if venus fly traps were animals, they would be very unusual animals"--that counterfactual is significant enough to make venus fly traps non-animals; why not with humans?
after all, a statement of the form "Xs evolved from Ys but are no longer Ys" is only necessarily false if you assume some kind of cladism about biological kind definitions, so why couldn't the Xs be humans and the Ys be animals?

>majority
hahahahahaha

refer to

>Though you'd be just as far off if you said Dolphins are wolves that swim and chat a lot.
Except dolphins aren't decedent from wolves. A better example would be to say that birds are dinosaurs. It's technically correct (unlike the wolf-dolphin example) but socially odd.

Depends on what you mean by "ape". We belong to the family hominidae, which by definition is part of the set of apes, so yes.

t. been readin' a lot of paleoanthropology lately

It was a wolf-like creature that no longer exists, in much the same way we're descended from an ape-like creature that no longer exists.

>if what kind a creature belongs to is just something we "decide," kinds are basically fictional
Welcome to the human condition... And well, language.

>there are obviously huge differences between humans and animals
None of which are both objective and fully universally consistent.

>after all, a statement of the form "Xs evolved from Ys but are no longer Ys" is only necessarily false if you assume some kind of cladism about biological kind definitions, so why couldn't the Xs be humans and the Ys be animals?
Well, you can certainly objectively define humans as a species genetically, at least in the modern context (thanks largely to that genetic bottleneck way back when, and the other homos going extinct), but there's really no hard and fast way to separate them from animals. The separation is so amorphous as to only be colloquial, or, as with the legal definition, merely decree.

>Welcome to the human condition... And well, language.
you clearly don't know what you're saying because you just implied all categories are made up, a completely self-undermining notion
>None of which are both objective and fully universally consistent.
are you saying there *are* huge differences between humans and animals which have one of those properties but just none that have both?
>there's really no hard and fast way to separate them from animals
even if there were no "hard and fast" way there could still be a way
and even if there were no way that could just be an epistemic problem
i'm not convinced there is no hard and fast way though
even assuming total metaphysical naturalism, humans are massively different from animals, none of which have civilization, art, spirituality, philosophy, etc. etc.
and given some kind of anti-naturalism there is the possibility of a special connection between humanity and the divine dimension of reality which most religious or spiritual traditions claim

>you clearly don't know what you're saying because you just implied all categories are made up, a completely self-undermining notion
I'm saying we defined "animal" in such a way that it doesn't exclude us, thus we are animals, by our own definition.

>are you saying there *are* huge differences between humans and animals which have one of those properties but just none that have both?
Every property and behavior that we have tried to objectively point to and claim "is uniquely humans", has either been found in other animals, or is directly derived from properties one or more other species have - save maybe our unique DNA code, which doesn't make us any more unique than any other species of animal.

>even if there were no "hard and fast" way there could still be a way
Well, if you have one, I'd love to hear it. It's certainly something folks have been trying to do for generations, as not being able to separate ourselves does rather infuriate some folks.

>none of which have civilization, art, spirituality, philosophy
Teach an ape to sign and ask it about God, you'll tend to get spirituality and philosophy in one go (if from a childish perspective). Art, similarly, debatable.

No other species exemplifies all the things we consider human in the same combination and degree, but the same could be said about many other species and their "unique" behaviors, thus there's no hard and fast objective line to separate man from beast.

Though that may change in the future, and are certainly some crucial achievements unique to our species, even if some of them are merely common survival instinct taken to unprecedented heights.

>Teach an ape to sign and ask it about God, you'll tend to get spirituality and philosophy in one go
that's such a stretch i don't think you believe it yourself
>No other species exemplifies all the things we consider human in the same combination and degree
there are plenty of properties that humans have that no animal has, like the ones i mentioned
the supposed counterexamples are always just instances where some animal has what could be seen as the beginnings of a human trait, so the claim becomes "it's a difference in degree not in kind"
but the degree could be great enough to amount to a difference in kind, or anyway at least great enough to undergird a differentiation between humans and animals
also, the argument "X and Y have no sharp line between them, hence there is no distinction" is recognized as a fallacy since ancient times

None of that had any meaning or basis in fact. You misunderstand phylogeny entirely.

explain

I have tried before and I know from experience that the best I can hope for after I explain is the lack of a response, the worst is a stupid response. I wouldn't be able to tell you anything that you cannot find online, since this is pretty straightforward stuff, and I don't have the will to teach right now. I just wanted to point out that you misunderstand phylogeny and let you do the rest.

for a bit of direction though, perform some 16S alignments, or better still, some kind of multi locus sequence variation approach between a selection of animals and you will see that many organisms which are within the animal kingdom are more distantly related than we are from apes. Think about the genetics and stop trying to argue the semantics of 'what is human and what is animal', it makes no sense in the context of evolution.

source: Genomics Ph.D

yes, we are apes and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

No.

Apes and man evolved independently & apart from each other, but share a common ancestor that isn't ape or man.

•Also, what is up with this thread and all these retarded Christian preschool ideas about taxonomy? Is this just a veiled /pol/ or troll thread or something?

>a common ancestor that isn't ape or man.
And what is it? Mouse?

I just say we're monkeys because it sounds better. In any case, there is no significant implication that comes from this outside of biological taxonomy. Just because we know we're apes doesn't fundamentally change how we behave as a species of anything.

>that's such a stretch i don't think you believe it yourself
Well, the two examples I recall were somewhat debated as to the amount of coaching involved. One ape theorized that God must be a woman, because only women can give babies (think that was Koko), and the other (a male whose name I don't recall), figured God must be a tree, because all food, and thus he presumed life, comes from trees. *shrug* Close enough, given the IQ level and the sort of reasoning you'd expect from a toddler.

...So the end question is, how do you draw that line? Seems the best you can do is pretty fuzzy for now.

It is the same thing as the chicken and the egg. The egg came first because the thing that laid the egg was 1 mutation away from being a chicken and the thing in the egg had the last mutation that made it a full fledged chicken.

You are not too far off though. More than likely there was a large population of things like in this image. Along the way there were different mutations in various populations, each successful enough to carry on and develop into a different type of mammal until you have whales, mice, men, chimps, ect. Though, the branching will be more complex than that and that is just a very poor example, but you should get the idea.

just another illustration of the fact that PhDs are wasted on STEMfags
your basic argument is
>stop trying to argue the semantics of 'what is human and what is animal' becuz genetics and evolution
which makes a host of philosophical assumptions that you're probably constitutionally incapable of becoming aware of

The ancient chicken wasn't the modern chicken, but it was still a chicken, no?

the idea that any of those apes had any idea of god is laughable
>how do you draw that line? Seems the best you can do is pretty fuzzy for now.
i adressed this here:

If humans and apes have a common ancestor, why do we have a different number of chromosomes? If some faraway ancestor mutated a different number of chromosomes from its peers, they would not have been able to reproduce to pass this on.

How did this difference ever come about?

There's a lot of such great differences.
1. Foxes caused an ecological disaster in Australia. Are they greater than animals?
2. Ebola is way more deadly than flu. Is it greater than a virus?
3. Colorado beetle is a disaster too. Is it greater than an insect?

A couple of chromosomes merged. Probably had unstable chromosomes that could reproduce.

nice bait.
My argument was: "here is a starting point, stop trying to make me spoodfeed you the rest"
Another illustration of why you could not be in STEM.

Science isn't a consensus

The ancient chicken was born from a dinosaur that wasn't a chicken in any way.

No, but theories and axioms are.

>there's no difference great enough to make different kinds
this destroys all classification, biological and otherwise

>My argument was: "here is a starting point, stop trying to make me spoodfeed you the rest"
no, that thing i quoted you on revealed what your basic thinking here is
you think there is something in genetics and evolution that settles the issue beyond all debate, and that position is loaded with philosophical assumptions, as anyone familiar with philosophy of biology could tell you
another illustration of why STEMtards can't be intellectuals

try answering this: are birds dinosaurs?
explain your reasoning

by the way, if gradualistic differences can't be the basis of kind-distinctions, then biological classification is impossible anyway, since all differences between species are gradualistic

We attribute these terms to genetic lineages. In order to place a species within that group you need to prove membership to that lineage. You can try and force as many semantic pseudo-intellectual arguments as you like but the data is clear. Look at the data.

Humans belong to many, many groups of organisms from species level to domain level, one of those groups is a monophylum that comprises the apes. It is very simple. We are genetically closer to bonobos than a gorilla is to a gibbon yet all are considered apes (the latter being a 'lesser ape').

Your thinking (though you have not actually said what it is, instead falling back on ineffective flaming, so I am guessing here) seems to be "the terminology we use is arbitrary since the cut off points are arbitrary". This is casuistry at it's finest. The terminology is representative of actual observational evidence. E.g. An Apicomplexan bears membership to this phylum due to the presence of an apicoplast. A Gregarine bears membership to this subclass due to observations on its life cycle, morphology and other specific characterisations.

Philosophy is useful where there is no data, but it cannot overrule data if it is available.

>Your thinking seems to be "the terminology we use is arbitrary since the cut off points are arbitrary"
not at all, i've actually been arguing for realism about categories against several anti-realists in this thread alone, i even specifically pointed out that that argument would be the fallacy of the heap
>We attribute these terms to genetic lineages. In order to place a species within that group you need to prove membership to that lineage.
this is a controversial position relying on the cladistic concept of species
there's valid disagreement over whether birds are dinosaurs even though birds descend from dinosaurs
similarly humans might not be animals even though humans descend from animals

Well they of course had the concept of a creator explained to them first. They learned cause and effect, and went from there - like any young human would.

But no, you really didn't, thought we covered that.

You can still classify species, taxonomy, plant, alive, not alive, etc. But it is true, by the biological definition, at no point does an animal cease being an animal, regardless of how it evolves.

Well, I suppose if it transfers its consciousness to a mechanical shell, virtual reality, or some sci-fi shit, then yeah, it does.

There's also the gray area, when it begins to deliberately alter its own genetics through non-biological means. Direct artificial alteration would give you a biological definition. Granted, that means Monsanto's plants are more not-plants than we are not-animals.

>Monsanto's plants are more not-plants than we are not-animals
Well, given that Monsanto's plants are functionally spliced with either bacteria, viruses, or insects, depending on the type, that's certainly true.

>Well they of course had the concept of a creator explained to them first.
you probably know as well as i do the the speciousness of that research and the controversy about it
if i were you i would not for a second let my argument about human-animal difference hinge on shaky empirical foundations like that
but even if their alleged findings were 100% vindicated, there is an additional argument needed to the effect that if an ape, at the peak of its ability, is capable of understanding a concept like "god" at the level of a human infant, then humans are also animals
>But no, you really didn't
i did, i mentioned candidate properties to draw a line, explained that "line-drawing" isn't really necessary, and said that the argument from the impossibility of drawing a line to the non-existence of a distinction is the fallacy of the heap anyway. it's all in

>But it is true, by the biological definition, at no point does an animal cease being an animal, regardless of how it evolves.
this is the point at issue; merely restating it just begs the question
the question is if humans, though evolved from animals and genetically almost identical to certain animals, might have ceased to be animals
if you hold to a "biological definition" which purports to settle this issue by fiat then your definition is just stipulative, and the concept it defines might as well be called something else like "beenimal" because it is not the concept "animal" which existed prior to these biological stipulations and still does

The smartest animals are apes, dolphin, elephant, crow and rat - they are unrelated, so intellectual ability can't be used for biological classification. And did we determine, what is the actual cause of intelligence or even spirituality?

>2017
>he still believes organisms are seperate from eachother.
Lmao, humans aren't even physically seperate from plants.
All life is the same thing and reductive symbols are the only way we can understand it. And no, we are classified as animals.
But we are other things, we are also higher-order living systems and were that way before animals even evolved.
Life is a single entity of information that constrains entropy into work that mindfully interacts with its environment in order to continue living.
Pic related, its something the way life would look like if you viewed its growth over biological time. The start in the bottom left quadrant would be abiogenesis, the x=time y=complexity.
Of course this is an aporxamation, if a real graph could be made it would have more layers than Shrek and more walks the the trail of tears.
Why am I the only informed person schizoid enough for this intuition?

and cuttlefish and octopie

>are birds dinosaurs?
I heard birds have different rudimentary finger than dinosaurs, so they are unlikely to be related.

this would be news to me
but it would leave the conceptual issue intact, the old chestnut about birds descending from dinosaurs would still be a useful lens to explore concepts of biological classification through

this assumes that biological classification must be entirely based on relatedness, and also that "intelligence" is the one distinguishing factor of humans

>so the claim becomes "it's a difference in degree not in kind" but the degree could be great enough to amount to a difference in kind
...These two claims are mutually exclusive.

Look...

If you define an animal as:
>- Multicellular, meaning they are made up of more than one cell.
>- Eukaryotes, meaning their cells have a nucleus.
>- Motile, meaning they are capable of moving under their own power and consume energy to do so.
>- Heterotrophic, meaning they must consume other organisms or the products of other organisms in order to replenish that energy.
Then humans are animals, no ifs, ands, or buts.

If you define an animal as:
>A creature or living thing, other than human, being able to move of its own accord.
Then they aren't.

Humans, biologically, are animals.

They may not be legally or colloquially, but that's a matter of dictate, not science.

Either you're discussing them biologically, or colloquially/spiritually. The biological venn diagram is pretty clean cut as is the other.

humans and apes are though to have common genetic ancestry, at some point a species branched off into several (humans and apes being 2 of them)

I can't tell if you're stupid or retarded.

That file name even says "placental."
That's the last common ancestor of all placental mammals, not man and ape you fuck.

Elaborate on that, and maybe we can find out.

those are not the only two definitions available, and it is not necessary to base either definition on "dictate" when arguments exist
as for basing a definition on a "dictate" see >Humans, biologically, are animals.
this is the claim at issue, simply reasserting it is begging the question

Not him, but they both share that as a common ancestor. I don't think he meant to indicate that it was the most recent ancestor they both share.

Wolf and dolphin aren't taxonomic terms. Dolphins did not come from wolves. You even said dolphins came from wolf-like creatures, i.e. not wolves. I'd wager you knew all this already.

Well that would presumably be why I used the phrase "wolf-like".

If you follow the chain of replies,
>Apes and man evolved independently & apart from each other, but share a common ancestor that isn't ape or man.

>this is the claim at issue, simply reasserting it is begging the question
How is that claim at issue? Do humans not fit inside that definition?

So your premise that dolphins could be considered an advanced wolf is nonsense, and you do apparently know this.

Eh... Clicked too soon and somehow got that in the last post.

The common ancestor they share isn't ape or man - it's long extinct. It's certainly closer to both ape and man than that thing, yes, but he is still essentially right.

I don't like to use "advanced" in terms of evolution, but they are distant relatives of that wolf-like creature, just as we are distant relatives of an ape-like creature, so no, it's not nonsense.

But yes, I suppose one should make the distinction that the modern wolves have nothing to do with it, save, perhaps, that both the modern wolves and the dolphins share a placental mammalian relative.

It's not that humans aren't apes necessarily, it's just that there are quite a few anatomical features humans have that literally no other ape has.

What's weird about it is these features don't appear gradually in the fossil record, a specimen simply has them almost fully or doesn't have them at all. Some people exaggerate this and say humans aren't apes, but the truth is there's a fairly wide gap between humans and all other primates.

>The ancient chicken was born from a dinosaur that wasn't a chicken in any way.
Well that doesn't make sense. There has to be a spectrum of "chicken-ness", where each successive inherited mutation becomes more like a chicken.

Though that still calls into question at what point a non-chicken laid a chicken, but at least the spectrum concept has a spot for a 0-value of chicken-ness.

was your dad an ape?

humans make humans

apes make apes

for all their "theories" they can never explain this simple truth

You don't generally get gradual changes between species, as slight improvements tend to outbreed or integrate quite quickly, and then, particularly in the case of humans, you get into bottlenecks of geographic and genetic isolation.

...or at least that's the conventional explanation for the stair stepping effect - there are of course, others.

It's really not important enough to be this pedantic about. It's not exactly wrong to think of ourselves as apes.

None of it really matters. Evolution is a nice story, and that's about it as far as it being applicable to our everyday lives. Various psychos will use it as an excuse to act like an animal, but they were going to acts like animals regardless.

Being speciest and saying we were created uniquely by God isn't any worse.

Well, there's problems with both approaches.

Medical and research wise, the god thing is of course problematic, while socially, the lack there of can be disconcerting.

Social animals don't put up with members behaving "like animals" either, from their own perspective. Coyotes, will, for instance, kill or remove problematic members. (Which is why if you see a lone one you should likely steer clear, as if it isn't a scout, it maybe rabid.)

There's something to be said for remembering part of being a functional human being is rising above your baser instincts, and that we surpassed the natural selection rut the rest of the animal kingdom is in by acquiring the ability pass on more information more reliably through non-genetic means.

On the other hand, that lack of spiritual dictate leads everyone free to question everything, and humans being humans, they'll often assume they know better than their ancestors did, without fully understanding all the nuances that made them choose to live the way they did, sometimes leading less to advancement, and more to nightmarish awakening to simple truths abandoned as "primitive", when they forget their historical ancestors, while they may not have had the same mountain of information to work with, weren't actually any less intelligent or wise.

But again, it's also kinda depressing to think that our creator would be, well, so uncreative. I mean, yes, there's a wide variety of life on the planet, but there's so many slight variants on the same theme, that it's clear that if life wasn't allowed to simply develop on its own from a single source, someone got stuck in a rut. Seems that in a world created by omnipotent magic all at once, every creature should be entirely unique and perfect, rather than, for instance, the same old four limbs, head and spine shit over and over again with all sorts of incidental design flaws.

It would be "chicken-like" but not at all a "chicken." Hell, the last mutation may have very well been real feathers instead of proto-feathers.

I believe Darwin's version. There's no reason to think we're different from the other apes simply because we're hairless.