I sort of thought so, but then people have been giving different answers even for the ultra-simplified case without any real world considerations, so now sort of think it might not as boring as all that after all.
[quote=“kwalsh, post:85, topic:77268”]But the rope the monkey’s holding can never exert an upward force on him of more than 98N since all the tension in it is due only to the mass on the other side (10kg x 9.8N/kg = 98N) and since the monkey himself already weighs 98N, at best the two forces on the monkey–98N up due to the rope, 98N due to gravity on the monkey’s body–are balanced.[/quote]That means the rope can’t pull up a monkey suspended from it, but it doesn’t give a good consideration of what happens when she tries climbing, because then there is some friction to slide her and the rope relative to one another. That gives a force in addition to the 98 N tension that is balancing gravity; the tension then balances gravity and so keeps her motionless in the air once she stops again.
The relationships are clear but language doesn’t have to reflect them. In normal English apes are simians, while monkeys are simians that are not apes. Wikipedia doesn’t really confuse the issue so much as plainly give monkeys as two separate groups – the New World parvorder Platyrrhini, and the Old World family Cercopithecidae as part of the parvorder Catarrhini. With this meaning monkeys are not a clade.
That’s a concern for formal taxa but not necessarily common language. Even biologists still find value in talking about protists, invertebrates, or fish. The last is a good example where I’d argue it’s better not to include all the evolutionary descendants, because things with fins and gills are a useful functional category, and if you wanted to include the things with legs and lungs there’s already the word “vertebrate” for that.
In this case I’m not sure monkey is so valuable a category in the absence of apes, but since there is the more precise word simian when you want to include them, it seems needlessly confusing to try and change the popular meaning.
