Fake primatologist dissects Trump's tweets

And occasionally eating our kids.

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Pfft. I could do this, all you gotta do is describe every Trump tweet as “primate flings own feces at rest of community.”

Fun fact: koalas smell like cough drops

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That’s common knowledge. Even those who don’t buy it are aware but deny it.

That argument itself is a deliberate misrepresentation intended to make the evolutionary explanaition seem foolish, and make it difficult to defend.

As your own cladagram shows. Humans are not descended from the extent apes. Humans are apes who share a common ancestor with the other extant apes. And far enough back all of primates.

That’s sort of how clades work. We, monkeys and apes are all in a clade. Then there’s a clade that’s just us and apes, no monkeys. Then there’s a clade that’s just us and great apes, no gibbons and what have. Then one thats just us and chimps. Then one that’s just us and non-chimp line human ancestors. Not long after that the utility of clades falls off and you’re talking all of genus Homo. Then just Homo Sapiens.

Its all nested! So in a clade sense no we are not monkey’s. We’re whatever the name of that clade that includes primates of the monkey/ape/human type is called. According to the above cladogram that’s “simiformes”. Not “monkeys”. I don’t know what the clade name for fish on through tetrapods is off the top of my head. But it is not “fish”

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The myth that makes this “joke” not so funny, has been the idea that there’s nothing really complicated of difficult about running a government. Why, you could drown it in a bathtub, and everyone would be better off!

They think that since business is easy (from their perspective it kind of is) and government looks just like a business (from their perspective is kind of does) then how hard could it possibly be?

Thus, the commander in chief acts perpetually surprised when it turns out the job is harder than he thought. And he then makes the mistake of blaming his detractors for the difficulty of the job. If it weren’t for so many people opposing him it would be fun, even!

Jeezuz, I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Bush Sr. That guy at least seemed to take the job seriously.

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I am not a biologist, but a(n evolutionary) biologist i respect put it pretty much the way i did:

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Eh Its a common approach for teaching the subject. I just think the detailed approach is more interesting.

Ooogh. I’d have to spend hours washing my kids before I could even consider that.

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Really just “vertebrates”, though some people who think hagfish are not closely related to lampreys may exclude them, in which case “craniates”. Of course, the whole point of calling us fish would be that there is no clade of fish that doesn’t include us, though personally I agree it’s silly to insist the word has to be redefined as a clade when there are already unambiguous names for those.

If we’re being technical, the ICZN only regulates how taxonomical names work, not what classifications people use. That’s left up to practicing taxonomists, who have had humans as Primates since Linnaeus, more than a century before the commission was formed.

Linnaeus did have humans in their own family, but apparently knew that was dubious:

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Yeah I did some half assed googling. apparently there might not be one for all fish and tertrapods. Used to be “Teleostomi” but that’s no longer valid die to weirdness about which fish are related to each other and which of those groups are related to the other groups. So there might be one for most fish plus tertrapods.

tetrapods, surely?

Just as a tetrahedron is a D4, a tetrapod is a four limbed creature–according to the Greek, four footed, but abstracted to include wings and arms.

Typos are fun! It is actually tetrapod.

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Using the theory of “Why not both,” this is clinically satirical:
(Though I suspect that within the first hundred days this will become criminally satirical)

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Well, like I said, “vertebrates” or “craniates” is the smallest clade that includes all the animals typically considered fish in guides and ichthyology texts.

  1. If you want to leave out jawless fish, then use “Gnathostomata”.
  • If you also want to leave out the extinct placoderms, for some reason, you would use “Eugnathostomata”.
  • If you also want to leave out cartilaginous fish and their extinct relatives, most people now use “Osteichthyes” to mean this clade (previously it left out tetrapods). “Euteleostomi” means the same thing.

“Teleostomi” was supposed to keep in the extinct acanthodes, but they turn out to belong with the cartilaginous fish instead. These kind of names are given to every node on every hypothetical tree, so add up quickly, without necessarily conveying much new in concept. I think you lose little sticking to the more traditional ones, which tend to say the most about the animals themselves.

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If I spent all my time eating eucalyptus leaves and didn’t smell of cough drops, I would be surprised.

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And if you want to annoy a bunch of biologists, drop into a “what are fish” argument with a casual mention of crayfish, cuttlefish, shellfish and/or jellyfish.

Taxonomy is always controversial.

Unfortunately, @TrumpintheWild is no longer active.

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