Hi Mark, Perhaps you can point out any errors in the post by Horse to which you objected:
Horse: > According to current theory/evidence (dependent on who you read): > Humans didn't evolve from apes - apes and humans had a common ancestor. > Apes and hominids are thought to have diverged about 7 million years ago. > > And when you say human, do you mean homo sapiens or earlier instances of > humans (Neanderthal, Cro-magnon etc.) because there have been 20-some > different 'species' of 'humans' in the last 7 million years or so - again > dependent on who you read). These species are, apparently, distinct from > apes. > > So not only is it quite reasonable that 'Ape' is a concept, but it is just > as reasonable that 'Human' is a concept too. > It all depends on what you need to achieve through classification. >From wikipedia: "The modern theory of evolution depends on a fundamental redefinition of "species". Prior to Darwin, naturalists viewed species as ideal or general types, which could be exemplified by an ideal specimen bearing all the traits general to the species. Darwin's theories shifted attention from uniformity to variation and from the general to the particular. According to intellectual historian Louis Menand, 'Once our attention is redirected to the individual, we need another way of making generalizations. We are no longer interested in the conformity of an individual to an ideal type; we are now interested in the relation of an individual to the other individuals with which it interacts. To generalize about groups of interacting individuals, we need to drop the language of types and essences, which is prescriptive (telling us what finches should be), and adopt the language of statistics and probability, which is predictive (telling us what the average finch, under specified conditions, is likely to do). Relations will be more important than categories; functions, which are variable, will be more important than purposes; transitions will be more important than boundaries; sequences will be more important than hierarchies.' This shift results in a new approach to "species"; Darwin concluded that species are what they appear to be: ideas, which are provisionally useful for naming groups of interacting individuals. "I look at the term species", he wrote, "as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other ... It does not essentially differ from the word variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for convenience sake." Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
