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Are you a Monkey?

I am a monkey, but instead of just stopping with the quip I'm willing to go ahead and explain why. Evolution "skeptics" (or even skeptics) will either learn something about phylogenetic relationships or be so bored they won't continue to bother me with their ingorant nonsense.
 
Are parrots a kind of fish, reptile and invertebrate, too? All at the same time?
 
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I am a monkey, but instead of just stopping with the quip I'm willing to go ahead and explain why. Evolution "skeptics" (or even skeptics) will either learn something about phylogenetic relationships or be so bored they won't continue to bother me with their ingorant nonsense.

Sorry, but if you're going into phylogenetic cladistics, then we can be either apes (Proconsul and descendants), catarrhines (Aegyptopithecus and descendants) , Simians (Eosimias and descendants), Primates (Plesiadapis and descendants) and on and on going all the way back to the first living creature.

The fact is that Apes split from Catarrhine monkeys about 25 million years ago, are a quite valid and useful way to describe humans and our relatives, and are easily distinguished from Catarrhine Monkeys by the combination of 5 cusped molars and lack of tails.


ETA: To sum up, if we're monkeys, then we're also lobe-finned fish, because us and all other living mammals, reptiles, birds, lungfish and coelacanths are all descended from a 400 odd million year old lobe-finned fish.
 
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Sorry, but if you're going into phylogenetic cladistics, then we can be either apes (Proconsul and descendants), catarrhines (Aegyptopithecus and descendants) , Simians (Eosimias and descendants), Primates (Plesiadapis and descendants) and on and on going all the way back to the first living creature.

The fact is that Apes split from Catarrhine monkeys about 25 million years ago, are a quite valid and useful way to describe humans and our relatives, and are easily distinguished from Catarrhine Monkeys by the combination of 5 cusped molars and lack of tails.


ETA: To sum up, if we're monkeys, then we're also lobe-finned fish, because us and all other living mammals, reptiles, birds, lungfish and coelacanths are all descended from a 400 odd million year old lobe-finned fish.

Why are you sorry?
 
Yeah, since you basically gave me the same speil I give people when expanding on my answer.

And Damien, we are "fish", though we obviously aren't fish.
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fi...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303987993&sr=1-1

Ah. Well in that case we're in complete agreement. And I'll have to get that book, it looks very interesting.


This also led me to finding the coolest primate name ever: Necrolemur!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrolemur
 
What this thread really shows is that we need a better word than Monkey when describing new world and old world monkeys, given there's more separating monkeys and monkeys than there is monkeys and apes
 
That has apes on the same line with some monkeys, after separating from another line that has other monkeys on it. In other words, first the two groups of monkeys split from each other, and then one of them split again, with apes coming from that second split. So, with a group being an ancestor and all of its descendants, there's no single group that includes all monkeys but not apes; monkeys have to either include apes in order to be a single group, or be a combination of two separate groups in order to exclude apes.
From the wiki entry on monkey:
The term 'monkey' is an artificial grouping; it is not a "good" taxon, but instead it is a paraphyletic group, like "fish". A "good" taxon, as most modern biologists consider it, is a monophyletic group, that is, a group consisting of all the evolutionary descendants of a single ancestor species. The term 'monkey' covers all platyrrhines (flat, broad noses) and some catarrhines (nostrils-downwards), but excludes the apes.
So yes, it is paraphyletic, apparently. But wait, there's more:
I'm not sure what in that Wiki link you are pointing out but the TOL Web Project is a lot more reliable because of scientific peer review than the Wiki entry. I like Wiki for searching for links but I try to go to the links directly when I can.
Unfortunately, the TOL doesn't give names with all the branches. The German wiki entry DC gave has the same structure of tree as the TOL entry you gave. The branch which unifies Old World and New World monkeys and apes has a name, though - in the German wiki entry it's called Anthropoidae, but that's an old name. The new name is Simiiformes, or in plain English: simians.
The simians (infraorder Simiiformes) are the "higher primates" familiar to most people: the Old World monkeys and apes, including humans, (together being the catarrhines), and the New World monkeys or platyrrhines.
How lovely when your language freely borrows words from various other languages. :D

As for translations into German, I can't comment other than to say is the terminology is likely the discretion of a translator, not a biologist. If it is a language issue then in German there should still be a category for great apes and one for monkeys regardless of the vocabulary used.
The German word "Affe" (cognate with English ape) is synonym with simian in English - it includes the apes, which are called "Menschenaffe" in German, i.e., "human-like simian".
 
Try reading something more up to date if you're interested in human evolution.

I have lots of experience with monkeys and I can tell you for certain, not are they not like us, They don't even like us. But I will play along, what has happened with evolution is not explained in the voyage of the beagle that I need to know?
 
My language makes no distinction between ape and monkey. They're both called 'ape', although the tailless ones are sometimes called 'menneskeaper' - that is, human monkeys. I think this is true for other languages as well.
 
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My language makes no distinction between ape and monkey. They're both called 'ape', although the tailless ones are sometimes called 'menneskeaper' - that is, human monkeys.

And the tailed ones "apekatter" (ape cats).
 
And the tailed ones "apekatter" (ape cats).

Yes, I try to make a distinction between 'ape' and 'apekatt', that is tailless and tailed, but it's not an official distinction. Looking up 'apekatt' on the Norwegian Wikipedia redirects you to 'ape'.

ETA: Case in point, Julius, Norway's most famous chimpanzee, is often referred to as an 'apekatt', while Pippi's little monkey is often referred to simply as an 'ape'... :p
 
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