In certain circles it seems to be assumed that Christians and Muslims are automatically creationist and that atheists necessarily accept the fact of evolution. It’s also regrettably necessary to defend the acceptance of evolution from others who would seek to undermine that, and it’s even important from a Christian perspective to do so. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when a discussion with an atheist yesterday revealed that he actually knew very little about cladistics and taxonomy, and didn’t recognise what I had considered up to that point to be common knowledge.
There is a sense in which we are monkeys, and another in which we are lobe-finned fish, according to a cladistic view of classification. This is in the same sense that we’re primates and that birds are dinosaurs. All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds. But in yesterday’s conversation it became clear that the assertion that humans are monkeys sounded odd to the atheist in question, and it could be consigned to the sciency bin where sesame seeds are nuts but peanuts aren’t, and bananas are berries but blackberries aren’t. Part of the problem is using ordinary English-sounding words instead of Latin- or Greek-based jargon, but it’s equally important to recognise the sexist nature of language use which adopts classical terminology to exclude others from information. Or, y’know, people could just learn a bit of Greek. It isn’t hard for an English speaker to do so.
How, then, are we monkeys? It all comes down to something called cladistics. Back in the day, before people had genomes to look at easily, organisms used to be classified according to the notable features that they had at that point, with a lot of help from the fossil record. This necessitated a lot of speculation, and because the pressure of selection often leads to unrelated organisms with similar features it often looked like species were much more closely related than they really were, and that other species which were in fact quite close to each other weren’t. For instance, it used to be thought that armadillos, pangolins and aardvarks were closely related and that giraffes and dolphins weren’t. In fact the opposite is true. The first three merely pursue similar lifestyles. Aardvarks are kind of out on their own but are remotely related to elephants and manatees, and pangolins are related to cats and dogs, though not particularly closely. Armadillos, along with anteaters and sloths, diverged from other placental mammals unusually early and consequently have various features other placental mammals lack such as an unusually slow metabolism and large number of vertebrae and ribs. Giraffes and dolphins, on the other hand, are closely related. There is now a single order of mammals including both. Although this may not be obvious, one way of thinking of it is to consider that giraffes are kind of antelopes with long necks, antelopes are like goats and sheep, sheep are a bit like pigs, pigs are like hippos and whales are giant carnivorous sea-going hippos. Whales kind of started off as mammalian crocodiles close to hippopotami, which can be seen when one considers river dolphins. Of that list, the most dubious connection is actually between hippos and pigs, as the two are not in fact that close to each other.
Cladistics is the attitude towards classification that groups organisms with common ancestors together. The issue then arises of paraphyletic versus monophyletic groups. A monophyletic group is one which includes all the descendants of a particular, usually hypothetical, species. In other words, it’s a clade. A paraphyletic group has some of the descendants “pinched out”, leaving only some of the descendants of a species. Reptiles are notoriously not monophyletic because the common ancestor of all reptiles is also the common ancestor of all birds, ultimately, so either birds need to be considered reptiles or reptiles are not a clade, and there are other complications regarding reptiles I’ve gone into before which amount to reptiles not really existing at all as a natural group, even though they’re related. Cladism is often quite counterintuitive and I personally think it tends to obscure a different form of “natural kind” – a grouping which reflects the objective structure of the natural world, bearing in mind the complication of the words “natural” and “objective” – which is the way in which particular organisms occupy an ecological niche, so for instance there are scaly armoured mammals who eat ants and termites, not genetically related but nonetheless similar in an arguably objective way. Nonetheless, clades do seem to be natural kinds. I know I’ve written about this before but bear with me.
The conversation I originally referred to came out of a post that claimed “a monkey has never given birth to a human”, which is obviously fairly crass creationist propaganda. Cladistically, we are monkeys. A common ancestor of all monkeys lived in North America during the Eocene, around forty million years ago, and was effectively a tarsier with smaller eyes, along with adapids, who were also primates but ancestral to the likes of lemurs and bushbabies – the prosimians – and the omomyids were the ancestors of all simians – Old World monkeys, New World monkeys and apes. And this is where things came unstuck.
I suppose the definition of a monkey in most people’s minds is a simian with a tail. There might be some other details, such as the fact that their torsos are longer back to chest than shoulder to shoulder, and so on, but that’s basically it. There are exceptions of course, such as the pig-tailed macaque whose tail is very short, and I suspect there are other monkeys, in the conventional sense, with no tails at all. Apes, on the other hand, are tailless and have broader shoulders than their bodies are deep, and of course humans are apes.
These are nested groups. Humans are apes are Old World monkeys are simians are primates are archontoglires and so forth. If you imagine a Venn diagram, taking apes out of the set of simians would leave a gap, and this is a cladistic sin because not all descendants of omomyids are then included. This is how we are monkeys. However, there is a problem. Racism has besmirched the word “monkey” because White people tend to use it as a racist slur against Black people. Therefore it’s probably good to bear in mind that when we White people describe humans as “monkeys” or “apes”, that terminology has been used in racist ways. That said, this also depends on the idea that there are inferior and superior species, which is of course speciesist. One possible way out of it would be to use the dangerously jargonistic zoological terms simian, catarrhine and hominoids. There are also a couple of other groups within the simians which are worth a mention. I’ll do that later.
Hominoids include the great apes and lesser apes. There are eighteen species of gibbon, who form a separate clade to the great apes. These are smaller and more arboreal than great apes. They also all have the same chromosome number, meaning they can interbreed quite easily and it’s quite different for humans to tell the species apart, and apparently this is also true of the gibbons. They’re officially known as hylobatids. They also used to be more widespread and one recently extinct specimen is only known because one of them used to be part of a Chinese menagerie and got buried with her/his “owner”. There are also more species of great ape than previously thought because gorillas have turned out to consist of two species, Eastern and Western, and orang utan of three, Sumatran, Bornean and Tapanuli. Orang utan split from our ancestors around eighteen million years ago and are more arboreal than we are, although there used to be a giant species which some people think explains the Yeti and was, I imagine, terrestrial because it was almost three metres tall if it stood erect. There are also apparently chimpanzee-gorilla hybrids, which is possible because both have two dozen pairs of chromosomes, and of course there are bonobos. Humans, bonobos and chimpanzees seem to be about equally related to one another, although only humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes because chromosomes 2A and 2B in chimpanzees and the like are united in chromosome 2 in us. Human chromosomes are largely ordered in terms of size, with some of the shorter ones out of order, so if chimpanzee chromosomes are numbered in this way it’s kind of anthropocentric. It seems to have been claimed recently that bonobos are in fact Australopithecus afarensis, but I’m exceedingly doubtful of this idea. They are, however, quite close and if humans were classified in the same way as gorillas and orang utan, we’re members of the same genus as chimpanzees and bonobos – Pan. Of course we refer to ourselves as Homo sapiens, but strictly speaking this is unwarranted. I always find this fact strange because to me a human looks more like a gorilla or orang utan than a bonobo or chimpanzee, but this is probably something to do with our size influencing our proportions.
The word “ape” also refers to macaques, and generally to large Old World monkeys such as baboons, but zoologically the decision has been made to restrict it to great apes and gibbons. The trouble with referring to apes, including humans, as monkeys apart from its racist overtones is that to the uninformed it sounds kind of scientifically illiterate, and it definitely is rather playful to insist on this distinction. Even so, it means that the creationist comment about monkeys never giving birth to humans is nonsense, because if we are monkeys that always happens. My interlocutor was unaware of this, and I’ll come back to that because it’s actually the whole point of this blog post, but I have more waffling to do first.
New World monkeys are also simians. It used to be thought by some that New and Old World monkeys had evolved separately from prosimians, but this is disappointingly not what happened. In fact, they seem to be descended from early Old World monkeys who floated across on logs and the like when South America was an island continent. This is a shame because it could have implications for extraterrestrial intelligence if an approximately humanoid form had twice evolved independently. New World monkeys tend to be smaller, more arboreal, can have prehensile tails to grab branches and have nostrils on the sides of their noses rather than the front or bottom. The other thing about them which is interesting from an evolutionary viewpoint is that there are two distinct types, one physically larger than the other. The smaller family, the marmosets, seems to exist because prosimians were absent from South American rainforests and they live lives similar to each other. There used to be claims that there were South American apes, but these were politically motivated and really about attempting to claim that European humans and Native Americans were different species, so it was racist. Racism seems to come into discussion of primates rather a lot. To this end, it’s amusing that uakari, an unusual red-faced bald looking New World monkey, got their name because they looked like sunburnt White people, although of course this isn’t plugged into some massive structural and institutional global monster like anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, and so isn’t really racism. I do think this racism-like behaviour should have some kind of name though.
This, though, is what bothers me:
I am of course Christian in the sense that I converted to Christianity in 1985 and you can’t lose your salvation according to that particular branch of Protestant Christianity which seems to be quite Calvinist. I am also, in terms of my belief system, theist. I believe in an interventionist God who answers prayer. I also believe in evolution because, why wouldn’t I? To select another biological theory which is widely accepted, cell theory states that living organisms are primarily made up of one or more cells, all of which originate from previous cells. This is of course not strictly speaking true because there would’ve been a first cell at some point, and there are large disorganised parts of organisms such as coral and amber, but it’s basically true and not controversial, although at some point it was. Nobody sufficiently well-informed would reject cell theory, and likewise, nobody sufficiently well-informed would reject evolutionary theory. The fact that it has the word “theory” in it confuses some people because of the way that word is used outside a scientific context. There is, so far as I know, no tendency in any religion to reject cell theory. It’s just part of the world, just as evolution is.
As I say, I encountered this person who is atheist, online of course because of the current lockdown situation, on Facebook. He uses the atheist “A” symbol as a profile picture:
This symbol is the winner of a competition for a symbol for the Atheist Alliance International, and I think this is significant. The conversation I had with this guy seriously strayed into the realm of the confidently incorrect, as he attempted to claim that we are not monkeys, and I replied that cladistically we were because simians are the monophyletic taxon (group in classification) in question and to remove hominoids from that would make it paraphyletic. I went on to draw a parallel with sarcopterygians, i.e. “fish” with fleshy bases to their fins, because we are technically sarcopterygians looking at them cladistically. Coelocanths and humans have a common ancestor not shared with salmon, for example, and therefore we form a clade. He agreed that we are primates but not that we’re monkeys and didn’t understand what I meant by clade, monophyletic and paraphyletic, and in fact to my greater surprise, didn’t even know what New World monkeys are. Okay, so I can declare myself guilty of using anti-language here – language which aims to exclude rather than include. But I don’t think I did, because the person concerned, since he professed to know enough about evolution to recognise that we’re primates descended from other primates, and even that bonobos and australopithecines are very closely related (he claimed they were the same species, which I doubt strongly), could surely be assumed to know about cladistic models of taxonomy. Now he might not, of course, but this bothers me in a similar way to the active/passive belief thing (the claim that atheism is lack of belief in deities and not the presence of a belief that there are no deities), because it’s like people, who in this case happens to be atheist, just try to get by on the bare minimum information which, of course, supports their claim, but don’t seem to be interested in branching out into a wider field of related claims, and that attitude reminds me of the narrow-mindedness of fundamentalism. They dig a narrow channel into the corpus and take the minimum of what they think they need from it, and this isn’t enough. The reason it isn’t enough is that if they are going to defend evolution, and I think they want to do that and are very likely to be called upon to do so, creationists are probably going to end up wiping the floor with them if they’re not well-informed. It’s a liability to be this ignorant about the subject, and it’s important to defend evolutionary theory.
Carcinogenesis and the development of new strains of Covid-19 are examples of why evolution is important, and the more doubters there are, the more danger efforts such as attempts to treat or prevent cancer or develop approaches to combat epidemics are put in. Theists sometimes claim atheism is a religion, and of course it isn’t. Like theism, it’s an opinion. However, there are groups of atheists who, perhaps because they have a religious background, do kind of treat it like a religion. For instance, they tend to be politically left wing, and that’s fine in itself (I’m also a lefty of course), but atheism also fits right wing perspectives well and there are many right wing atheists, such as my father. It makes sense, for example, to assume there’s nobody but oneself to lean on and that one makes one’s own way in the world, and there’s also a moral freedom associated with atheism which serves both the right and the left, depending on where the focus is. I also wonder if having come from a background of organised religion, people consciously or subconsciously try to replicate it.
In my early twenties, with the people I hung out with at the time, the tendency was to be either a bit New Agey or atheist, but the atheism was kind of assumed, in a similar way, I imagine, to how people used to assume one was Christian. It wasn’t a big deal because it was the way things seemed to be trending and Christians were a bit weird and had a reputation of being either naïve or bigoted extremists. The current tendency I see as being at root American, either because it’s just how things are in the US and we’re interacting with that cultural milieu, or because it’s been imported from the States like a lot of other cultural phenomena. As such, it might make sense to have some kind of organised resistance to fundamentalism which, being organised, would probably have a tendency to coalesce into organisations. But anti-theistic atheists who oppose organised religion on such grounds as creationism, homophobia, opposition to abortion and other tendencies need to know that they have allies among Christians, theistic or not, and other theists. They also need to be, and I hesitate to use this language because it sounds quite aggressive and it should be remembered that active listening is very important, properly armed with extensive knowledge of things like evolution, why the world is round and the failure of reparative “therapy” for homosexuality. It isn’t enough just to come up with a limited list of set phrases and debunking strategies taken superficially off Rationalwiki or Wikipedia to defend what you already believe, because that’s rather similar to what fundamentalists do with, for example, their take on the Bible. It’s notable that quite a few Christian fundamentalists don’t seem to have read most of the Bible, and this renders their position vulnerable. The position people who seek to defend the values and beliefs often associated with atheism in the West among educated people must not be similarly superficial. We all need in depth knowledge if we are to succeed.
A Box Of Chocolates 