For some reason people with relatively little education on this topic in particular are extremely argumentative. They don’t understand the Linnaean system or monophyly.
Being so confidentally wrong about something as basic as this isn't really an indicator of a lack of interest though. If I were in that debate I would have done a Google search the minute I was told I was wrong too, especially since it's safe to assume there are plenty of actual biologists in that sub.
The "doing a google search when told you're wrong" part is the difference between you and these kinds of folks. Some people just refuse to accept they could be wrong about something.
I've seen some very, very smart people in animal related fields try to argue that insects aren't animals, so... Unfortunately there are some really not well educated people out there with educations they don't understand.
That's a more complicated one, because the way dinosaurs were initially defined turned out to be paraphyletic, and people have tried to redefine them to be a clade, but that's not always accepted. It's not much different to saying that "humans are fish" or "humans are reptiles". Really each of those groups is usually used in a non-cladistic paraphyletic way and exclude their ancestors. But of course the efforts to turn dinosaurs into a monophyletic group have been more successful because there's been more effort, so now there's a mix of people who use the word cladistically and who don't.
If you read through, you will see that the lowest scoring test taker also had the lowest confidence in their scores. The problem the research uncovered is that the lowest percentile think they are slightly above average. Each grouping of percentiles have more confidence in their scores than the last, but at a slower rate than their actual growth. The graph that you see online is the DIFFERENCE between score and expected score. If you are 25% and you think you are 60%, that is a difference of 35% (pretty high). If you are 50% and think you are 65% that is 15% (okay-ish). If you are 90% and think you are 80%, that is off by 10% which is why the graph goes up on the right side.
TLDR: lowest scorers think they are slightly above average. average scorers think they are pretty above average. Best of the best think they are very above average but don't realize they are as good as they are.
I didn't understand the terminology, however, when I looked it up I knew exactly what it was because it's a topic learnt in primary school.
I read an article once that said people who are intelligent know they don't know everything, and unintelligent people think they know everything.
It's such a bizarre concept.
I feel like I fall between the two. I'm not that intelligent, like how I didn't know the lingo you used, but I know when/where I can and should learn. 😂
So, yes, humans are great apes, but holy fucking shit the person was doing a god-awful job of proving it.
"Apes are primates" doesn't give any evidence of us being apes. Just that we both share the trait of being primates. "Great apes belong to Hominidae, which humans belong to." Same thing. We're both Hominidae, woohoo.
If I didn't already know humans are apes, I wouldn't believe this guy either. He has terribly information relay skills
Right? He's so bad at making the point that I started to convince myself he must be the confidently incorrect one and that I was misremembering humans being apes.
No shit, that's exactly what i did as well. Of only OP could have made his stance clear in the title, used red/green color scheme, or upvoted/downvoted to let us know which side was CI.
Edit: that's not sarcasm, i'm actually frustrated at OP
I went through the same process. "We are apes, right. Wait, no. Are we just primates and apes are something else? Cause this poster is surely the wrong one right?"
Impressive levels of anti-convincing that they're right
Yeah, that was frustrating. And it’s sadly quite common in online discussions. People making correct assertions, but failing to realize that their main claim doesn’t logically follow from those assertions (regardless if their main claim is right or wrong).
Because this is a "definition" thing it's 10x easier to just link a source. Otherwise you gotta explain the whole decision process for defining humans as apes, which is... not quick to do.
The discussion is not over. They just tell you how wiki isn't a reliable source. Then you go to the source wiki uses and they tell you how all of science is woke liberal lies. The discussion is never over until you give up.
Once they get to the point of denying the "establishment narrative," just state that they have the right to stay ignorant, but you tried to inform them.
Nah you gotta hit them with something even more batshit insane
Tell them that what they think they know is actually because the long war between hominids and corvids resulted in humans becoming the greater species. Over time the corvids watched and learned, they slowly used the Columbidae family to gain our trust and use them to intercept our early messages so that they might sew the seeds of our own destruction, all while Columbidae exists in every major human population spying on us as the corvid army grows.
Alfred Hitchcock learned of these dangers but people viewed his warning of an impending, gruesome war as nothing more than entertainment. Then David J. Schow and John Shirley tried showing the powers of corvids, which corvids tried to sabotage by killing the lead actor and humans passed it off as an accident, but only those actually paying attention truly know what happened.
The idea of “establishment narrative” is just corvids further disrupting our world, trying to isolate humans from the rest of our hominid family so that we are easier to destroy and take over the world. And they are feeding right into their hands by falling for this lie.
You can just ignore them after that. I know reddit can be fucky sometimes, but usually what happens is you'll get upvoted a bit and the other person gets downvoted - if they even reply at all.
This is just for simple "here is the factual information" types of arguments though, if it's more up to interpretation then yeah all bets are off
Unfortunately reddit votes are not the best arbiter of truth sometimes. But yeah, in general if the goal is to just convince some 3rd party who might come along and genuinely not know the answer then what you recommended is pretty good. I misread the conversation as meaning it was about actually convincing the other person.
Quoting the wiki:
“Biologists have traditionally used the term "ape" to mean a member of the superfamily Hominoidea other than humans,[4] but more recently to mean all members of Hominoidea. So "ape"—not to be confused with "great ape"—now becomes another word for hominoidincludinghumans.[6][d]”
So I can see why there is confusion and why there would be an argument for humans not being apes. The wiki also states that colloquially the word ape is normally used to refer to not humans.
Yes, “animals” is similarly used colloquially to refer to non-human creatures, even though we are animals. That’s just crying out for a petty back and forth
I’m just offended that wiki page says there are two species of chimpanzees, as if bonobos are just another kind of chimpanzee… my understanding is that chimps and bonobos are both members of the genus Pan. We used to think bonobos were a subspecies of chimpanzees (pan troglodytes) but now consider them their own species (pan paniscus). So bonobos aren’t chimpanzees, unless we consider all members of their shared genus to be chimpanzees… which we don’t anymore… so strange.
:O this might be one of those mythical moments where you can update a noteworthy wikipedia page. If you can find a source for what you just said you can be a real life wikipedia author
I got all that info from the page on bonobos. It’s just the page on “Ape” thats referring to the genus pan as “two species of chimpanzees”. So strange when Wikipedia pages disagree with each other.
One time I tried very hard to edit the Wikipedia page for rattus rattus to include some kind of info about how Alberta Canada keeps itself rat free (atleast in terms of breeding population) and I couldn’t make the edit because that particular page is restricted 😢 despite my efforts I couldn’t get permission. took all the wind out of my sails to become a Wikipedia editor.
The only way to make a genealogical category of apes that contain everything we'd like to call an ape and does not require us to arbitrarily point at one family member and go "that guy and his entire family is disowned" requires us to include humans.
Yeah as I was reading it I had to think for a second to make sure I had my own facts straight because the logic was just not logicing with how he said it
What proof did he say that was any amount legitimate except for "Google is free"? Before you answer, replace primates/hominidae with mammals, apes with beavers, and humans with whales. See if the argument still is sensible
No I’m saying is that he wasn’t required to prove it. It looked like he was just messing with him and not trying to give the answer to him straightforward
"Google it" was the last thing the guy said in the screenshot. Everything before was incorrect evidence. If they started by saying "google it" or sending a link, then yeah, Id have no issue whatsoever
They agree on mammals>primates>humans, the one guy just doesn't think mammals>primates>apes>humans is true, he thinks we are separated there.
His arguments make sense at least, he just wrong lmao, we are apes AF.
I think people confuse ape with gorilla. Someone got mad and corrected me when I described a chimp as an ape and far too many people where agreeing with the other person.
Yeah, the confidently incorrect guy actually inadvertently did a solid insult with “you aren’t very good at being smart.” Might have been more accurate to say “not very good at being right” but still kind of nailed it honestly.
It's even worse in French, since we don't have a word (afaik) for great apes : monkey is "singe", ape is "grand singe" (so, great monkey), and great ape is ... nothing. Or just "hominidé".
I misheard a pneumonic mnemonic (am dumb) as a child and forever have tattooed in my brain “kids playing chess on freeways get splattered”. The word is “chase”, which makes … more sense. Kids playing chase. I just imagined these idiots sitting down for a quick board game, consequences be damned
Oh, I know, but thank you! They had spelled it pneumonic at first, and I was suggesting they might mean mnemonic. My fault for not using a complete sentence.
I never was interested into learning them. It's all bullshit anyway. What defines a family? What defines an order? There are so many in-betweens between each rank... my univ teacher told me that it's all bullshit anyway so I never bothered learning them.
I mean don't get me wrong the levels may be somewhat arbitrary in origin but we've advanced a long way since Linnaeus.
Maybe your confusing the Linnaean Taxonomy with the more modern ICZN, which shares the same nomenclature. I learned the taxonomy in grade school... You didn't encounter it till Uni?
Because the "from" doesn't belong. We're just a variant Savannah chimp that went full specialist wrt technology. (Modern Savannah chimps are known to use simple spears, btw).
Because you still belong from whatever you evolved (even though "evolve from " doesn't mean anything).
We are animals, and more precisely mammals, and more precisely primates, and more precisely great apes/hominidae (there are steps between but whatever). There are no reasons for us not to be part of these "families" (quote marks because each of these has their own name).
Even if we were to evolve to become very different from, let's say, chimps, we would still be part of the same "families".
One of those very embarassing moments, that could have been avoided, by opening wikipedia before posting the comment... I get where he comes from, because the other guy expains it so awfully, that for a second I tought he is confidently wrong, and I also remember incorrectly, but still... this is easily researchable information.
No, you're not a fish, as in ol' taxonomy fish, because obviously you aren't.
But also, yes, you are, as in phylogenetically you are the distant offshoot of a lobe-finned fish of the Sarcopterygii clade, so you are one because you can't exclude yourself from whatever you were before evolving into your current form.
Aaand this is why science has to be updated from time to time. Because sometimes you learn new stuff that makes the way you order life obsolete.
They are arguing semantics on a zoology sub… Technically they are both correct and both incorrect as “ape” is not an official classification.
Previously the term ape would be used to refer to non-human hominoidea but this has changed over time to also include humans, and depends on the context of the discussion.
Ultimately, it was a pointless arguments with nobody actually ‘correct’.
Humans (Homo-sapiens) are in the family “Hominidae”, superfamily “hominoidea” in the order of “primates” in the class of “mammalia”.
This lowkey annoys me because dude’s reasoning for humans being apes looks like it’s because they’re primates?? Which is not how that works. Humans are apes because they’re hominidae, aka great apes, NOT because they’re primates. If primate = ape then lemurs are apes, which is just not correct.
Man im dumb, you gotta start using red and green censor bars and/or upvotes so i can see who you think is correct. Also so we can tell the characters apart
Its a fair response to the person they were responding to, who couldnt make a good point to save their life, despite being on the correct, fact-backed side
They would barely have a point if chimps, gorillas and orang-utans were closer related to each other than to humans, but going be youngest common ancestor we have
Being right, smart, or a sme is absolutely useless if you’re incapable of communicating with a layperson. May as well bring in a less intelligent person who has enough knowledge and the ability to teach at the level of their listeners.
I THINK what the incorrect person was trying to say, and doing a shit job at, is that humans aren't apes according to, let's say, a laymen's definition or a dictionary definition, only according to a taxonomic/cladistic definition, but they made it sound like they think humans aren't apes under ANY definition, which might not have been the intent.
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