Are Chimpanzees people?

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Only time will tell!

What is the difficulty in understanding the difference between species and genus?

In the case of humans to any other great ape it is pretty profound. Sure, there are a lot of similarities, but enough fundamental differences to make it pretty obvious.

Thanks for clarifying that you two have no idea what's being discussed here.

Whatever gets you through the night pal. The division between homo and the progenetors of Chimpanzees happened 4 to 7 million years ago or more. Chimps have a cranial capacity more in line with other great apes than ANY species we refer to as homo -. Chimps (while having complex social structure) do not display any significant features that set them apart from most other intelegent animal, etc etc.

I know the argument and it is nothing more than a sloppy attempt at trolling creationists by reclassifying a species for political purposes rather than anything remotely scientific.

However, you are simply ignoring evidence here Khor. For one thing, Chimpanzee brain is structurally closer to ours than that of other great apes, and the same sections are used in the same tasks, which is a very large similarity. The discovery of the use of same sections for communication is a very big deal. As was detailed before along with the ever-increasing amount of evidence in general, which you conveniently ignore by claiming its an attempt to troll creationists (pro-tip: You don't need to troll creationists, they're retarded and of no relevance to ANYTHING in the world, all their shit was debunked in the goddamn 19th century). If anything, the political purpose here is to AVOID confronting the issue. Or perhaps, more accurately, it's a religious purpose?

Or may perhaps you could invest the effort and read the OP.

This is because we descended from a common ancestor. The whole dilination of homo implies something closer to human (the word literally means human) and away from the common anscestor. Any other application is adding confusion to the matter for the sole purpose of obfuscating the actual use of the term towards a more jargon based handeling so some academic douches can get all snarky in evolution arguments.

Total and complete rubbish and outside what the scientific community should be doing (ie making science as easily accessible as possible by making terminology eloquent and intuative).

I never ignored any evidence. In fact I restated one of the more convincing arguments (at least from an anthropological point of view) both for and against using the homo- prefix to describe Chimps.
But let me be a little more clear. This is somethhing of a pet peeve with me as well. When we were young we used to call several types of dinosaurs by names completely different than what they now call them. What is the reason they give for changing a simple name of an animal? "It's more biologically correct."
Give me a break! There is nothing wrong with calling an extinct species something that doesn't truly reflect it's biological characteristics especially since doing so will result in confusion when you read older still valid texts about the animal you are researching.
Who cares if it's called a Brontosaurus? Continuity in terminology is more important so long as this terminology isn't used as a direct biological classifacation.

Which brings us back to the homo prefix (which is of course a direct biological classifacation). This is a classifacation that means HUMAN.

If you are seriously asking the question 'are Chimps human beings' than you have problems with your thought processes that go way beyond scientific fail.

As for me, I read the op and the whole thread. I am fascinated with this stuff but this topic reads more like a 'did the holocaust really happen' trolling than anything adressing real science.

The point should be to make science more accessible to greater ammounts of people not to keep confusing it by changing terminology for arbitrary or political reasons.

First niggers, now chimps. I wonder how low the definition of what is or what is not human is going to get.

What the average human would look like if it had the strength of a gorilla.





And just for the record, here is a powerlifter who went on a diet after an injury. Use the head size as a reference.

Chimps should be given the right to vote. It would be a testament that we have moved forward as a society, and that we are able to leave behind the arbitrary social dogmas of the past.

Vaarna_Aarne

As I said, they deviated before the earliest recognized member of homo and they have went through more mutations to date since that point of deviation than we have. They have done nothing other than drift away during the 4 million years from when our evolutionary lines are speculated to have diverged. Regardless, explaining evolution with taxonomy is like explaining physics with English rather than math. All of these names just help keep things convenient and give us a rough picture of how stuff is related. You don't understand the way that stuff is really related or how it's grouped until you start looking at the genes one-by-one, making comparisons, and filling in the gaps. Taxonomy doesn't even claim to do this, it's just taxonomy, it's just organization for our own ends.

Going to leave this here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1235277/?tool=pmcentrez

You are really asking this? People should always be highly suspicious when someone asks to expand a definition for something. It is usually emotionally motivated.


And for the record, I find ants much more fascinating than chimps.

Are finns people?

Well, we discussed ants earlier, so do chip in. I love talking about superorganisms. I did a little map about the size of ant nests, ant road network and traffic between nests of the colony in our family cabin two years ago (couldn't do it last year due to being sick at the time), which I will then hopefully check for changes that have occurred between that date and this summer. I can't do that with chimpanzees or other primates, since only snow monkeys live up here.

Well, the last common ancestor species has not yet been discovered, AFAIK.

Anyway, this was about changing the taxonomy to better reflect biological discoveries, most importantly in genetics. It must be remembered that most genii have much looser connections than the one between us and chimpanzee. It's good to keep in mind whatLouis Leakey said after Jane Goodall's discoveries in Gombe Stream that demolished all classical arguments for man's special place in nature: “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!” This statement was absolutely true back in the 60's, and it is even more true today as the genetic gap between us and chimpanzees has been revealed to be astonishingly small.

@Khor: The changes dinosaur names are not arbitrary. It's often that we discover that the original fossil assembly and recognition was mistaken, and that the two individual fossils classified as separate species were the same species after all. As a good example, recent studies by paleontologist Jack Horner suggested that, for example, in one instance three different fossils recognized as three different species turned out to be all part of the same species, at different stages of age!

Thus why I used the word 'speculated.'

Well, as I mentioned earlier, genetic gaps can be deceptive. We have about... what... 90% genetic similarity with mice? 96% with pigs? 98% with dolphins? Arguing on the basis of genetic similarity is silly. When a single nucleotide change can drastically alter the expression of the gene, a difference of 1-2% is plenty.

I'd rather propose that the classification of a human is as follows, if you are keen on classifying chimpanzees as human:
a) part of the ape family
b) exhibit advanced social behaviours which are similar to those performed by Homo sapiens
c) demonstrate intelligence in the form of tool-usage and problem-solving

Regardless of the answer, I still avoid areas of low-income housing

Yea, as listed in the OP. The role of genetic similarity is there as a last reinforcing detail.

Yes, but I don't think they were seriously considering accepting chimps as human beings. Do you?

I know that an that isn't what I was talking about. They actually changed the name of a few dinosaurs (for instance, there is now nothing called a brontosaurus). I don't see where this is at all helpful in the pursuit of understanding and in fact can cause confusion which is the very last thing scientific terminology should be trying to do.

And 70% shared DNA with sea sponges.

No, not really. It only causes confusion if people don't read up on their material beforehand. If you now know that brontosaurus has been reclassified as a species of apatosaurus, you aren't going to go back and read your older books and when you see brontosaurus, throw an apopletic fit of confusion wondering what IS brontosaurus!?!?!? Come on, man, just substitute the word mentally.

Scientific consensus was that brontosaurus and apatosaurus were too similar to be considered different species, and thus they were reclassified into the same genus. Would you prefer they continue with wrong labels?

Frankly it would be more confusing for scientists in their work if they followed your suggestion of never changing names. Taxonomy means we can look at a genus, and say: this organism possess these particular characteristics. Scientists don't name newly discovered organisms nilly-willy. That is what taxonomy should be reliable for. It is a tool for classification, it is a set of rules for naming, and if we find out new things about the organism that qualify it for renaming, we do so because if we don't, if no one does, future scientists down the line will have a headache when somehow organisms with a different genus start mating with one another.

Well, fine, it could possibly cause confusion amongst the laymen... but I think Dr. Dino confuses them enough already without any help from the scientists.

Again, I must reiterate that taxonomy is a tool. There are rules to using this tool that make life easier for every scientist. If you allow an exception on the basis that the name has been in use amongst laymen for years and shouldn't be changed, you're undermining the rules of taxonomy altogether. Might as well throw the whole damn thing out and let everyone call apes monkeys to minimize confusion.

Besides, it's highly doubtful the layman would be confused much by taxonomic reclassification of chimpanzees... I don't think most people think Pan Troglodytes or Pan Paniscus when they think about Chimpanzees. Dinosaurs are a bit different in this regard because most of them are known by the first half of their scientific name (Tyrannosaurus Rex is actually one of the only ones popularly known by their full scientific name) which denotes genus.

Though it is pretty fun to see the "are you shitting me" look on people's faces when you tell them that the scientific name of the Western Lowland Gorilla is... Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla.

*sigh* You still aren't understanding the issue here. Nobody is saying that chimpanzees are part of the species Homo Sapiens. The issue is that the structural, social and genetic divergence between our species and chimpanzee species is on a level that it would make more sense to classify them as part of the genus Homo. Most of our forms of greeting are used by chimpanzees, virtually all diseases are transmittable between us, etc. Personally, I'd say the issue is not that chimpanzees should be considered part of the genus Homo, but rather why aren't they considered a part of genus Homo? And what's the horror when confronted with the idea? You gotta remember, our ancestral species did not exactly develop eloquent speech or tool-culture until relatively recently... We weren't exactly chatting it up in Garden of Eden.

It would be a good thing to read In The Shadow Of Man. Then you'd know the starting point on why scientists are dead serious when they say chimpanzees are a species human.

Which is somehow more legitimate then taxonomic classification of humans because?