Reptiles

Lee Berman · 07 Jan 2011, 18:06 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 13:06:47 -0500
Subject: (urth) Reptiles
Message-ID: <SNT123-W5538A421296419E4F6FB6DCF0B0 at phx.gbl>

Oh sheesh, Antonio. I thought this thread was exhausted. I'll do my best to address
your questions, hopefully without straying too far, too long from Gene Wolfe stuff.

>It would seem that you feel calling an ape a monkey is demeaning to the ape, 
>and calling a monkey an ape is demeaning to the word 'ape'. That's an angle 
>I hadn't met previously.

Heh, well, if nobility is defined as "close to human" then I guess apes are more noble
than monkeys. Bigger and more intelligent, surely. But what about evolutionary success? Monkeys
are far more adaptable to changing environments and as a result are a much more sucessful
group than apes who are mostly on the verge of extinction (unless, as Desmond Morris does, 
you consider H. sapiens a "naked ape").

>many languages have a term for 'monkey', but not necessarily for 'ape',

Yes, I am aware of that. (and it is a good point). My pedantic tendencies are reserved for native 
English speakers and in my experience, many/most educated people in that category do know the ape-monkey 
difference.

>chimpanzees tend to be the archetypal monkey (due to the small size).

Chimps are bigger than any (in english) monkey. Only the biggest male baboons come close. We might
think of chimps (excl. bonobos) as small because of the prevalence of using the cute juvenile kind
on TV shows and such. But full-grown chimps are big, strong and ugly and often kinda mean. Rarely
seen on TV outside Nat'l Geog.

>Would it be unreasonable to call tuataras, crocodiles and dinosaurs 'lizards'? Legless lizards 'snakes'?

Depends. I wouldn't expect the general public to know that a tuatara is not a lizard and that a
legless lizard is not a snake. They are rare and they LOOK like their more prevalent cousins. (I don't 
even complain much if a rabbit is considered a rodent by the public). I think dinosaurs not being lizards 
is a bit more common knowledge these days, despite the word origin of "-saur". And most basic science classes 
would teach that reptiles are broken into the four main groupings so lizards and crocodiles can be separated.

>Some cladists feel so good calling birds 'dinosaurs' that they've successfully imposed that terminology on the 
>interwebs.

I say nix on that. Birds are even less "thunder lizards" than lizards. Let's let the 160 year old convention 
remain that the word "dinosaur" implies "extinct".

> then they  had to redefine dinosaurs to exclude the ancestors of mammalians. So that 
>what you used to call dinosaurs now have to be 'non-avian-dinosaurs + stem-mammals-and-whatnot'.

This part is in little doubt in modern paleontology. Dinosaurs (being warm-blooded) did give rise to birds but
not mammals. In fact the earliest mammals (derived from reptilian therapids) are notably older than the oldest
dinosaurs. Mammals had to spend 100 million years staying small, waiting for the dinosaurs to move out before
they made their big expansion. (we can be pretty sure some later dinosaurs had feathers but none had hair).

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