Grumpy

Or, to put it another way, take chimps out of the family Panidae and include the genus Pan within the Hominidae family. That would leave gorillas in Panidae by themselves.

Including chimps in the same genus as humans is silly, especially given the putative intermediates, which are different genera themselves.

pangloss

Chimps and gorillas are already in Hominidae.

Why is it silly? It is premised on a universal application of a standardized 'yardstick', vastly different from the arbitrary taxonomic ranking systems employed now.

Names can change, it is the 'story' that is important. I don't see why so many are so enamored and obsessed with keeping the status quo.

That seems silly to me.

Doubting Didymus

Why is there a controversy, exactly? Color me cladist, but I really don't understand any taxonomic system that isn't based on monophyletic groups.

By the way, Australopithecus is hypothesised as ancestral to us, but not to chimps, right? That is, Australopithecus represent an ancestral form of human-ape that exists after the divergence from chimps. Therefore australopithecus would have to be renamed Homo also.

Edit: In fact, I do believe that is what Grumpy was talking about, am I right? It would be silly to have both chimps and humans in Homo, when Australopithecus was still Australopithecus. Everything, at least back to the chimp-human common ancestor, would have to be renamed Homo, which is just fine and dandy with me.

Homo afarensis will take some getting used to, though.

Emma Peel

Chimps in no way belong in Homo - not if Ernst Mayr is correct in his definition of Genus:

Doubting Didymus

Even so, they should certainly not be in a genus with gorillas. Without humans in that group also, it constitutes a paraphyletic group, unacceptable in cladistics. If humans should be a genus on their own, then so should chimpanzees be.

MrDarwin

Only problem is, there is no consensus on a definition of "genus", even if it's written on stone tablets handed down by St. Ernst himself. A genus is whatever the taxonomist treating a particular group wants it to be. One advantage of cladistics is that it forces taxonomists to look at circumscriptions of genera with respect to related groups, and suggests how to draw lines around groups and name them (but not where to draw the lines, or what names to use).

Ergaster

Doesn't Goodman et al. try this about once a year or so?



They're both in subfamily Homininae as well, by most recent taxonomic schemas.

Of course it does.

Arguing about taxonomy is what paleoanthropologists do in their spare time.

But (slightly more seriously), I think we have not yet begun to understand the diversity of hominids and hominins that may or may not have existed in the Miocene, Pliocene, and (at least) early to Middle Pleistocene. One of the reasons I lean toword splitting rather than lumping is because of the tendency to "lose" real taxa within a name, so to speak, if one lumps a little too hastily. If one "splits", then the taxa are "visible" and one is more inclined to investigate whether they are real or not.

At some point the lumping of hominins into the genus Homo might make sense. I don't think we know enough about the hominin fossil record, and especially the early hominin fossil record (and we know exactly zero about the Pan fossil record) to do it just for the sake of the "yardstick".

(Argh. that's why there's a "preview" button!!)

MrDarwin

Here's coverage of the same story by sciencedaily.com:

DNA Demands Chimps Be Grouped In The Human Genus, Say Wayne State Researchers

(According to the sciencedaily article, the original article should be available online but I haven't been able to access it.)

As far as I can tell, all these scientists are doing is confirming what we already know: that chimps are more closely related to modern humans than either species is to gorillas, and the relationship is a close one. The problem is that it is impossible to say by DNA alone whether two species should be in the same genus or different genera, because there is no accepted measure of how much genetic divergence merits generic separation. The DNA does not say whether humans and chimps should be in the same genus because genera are not defined by DNA.

Personally, I would have no enormous problem with classifying chimpanzees (and by implication, australopithecines) in the genus Homo but I'd like to see whether these researchers have addressed how the genus Homo is defined in the first place. Now, if the DNA indicated that chimps were derived from within a group already defined as genus Homo, that would be excellent support for their claims. But without DNA from other hominids like australopithecines, or more importantly, from other species of Homo, it's just plain irresponsible to be making claims like this, and things like this give science a bad name. It sounds like they're just looking for media attention (and getting it).

MrDarwin

I couldn't agree more. I think lumpers (at the species, genus, and even family level) have done real damage to taxonomy by obscuring diversity, and by making definitions of various groups so broad and vague as to be completely useless (for a botanical example, "Liliaceae"). Moreover, lumpers tend to emphasize plesiomorphic characters, which are uninformative when it comes to establishing relationships within and between groups.

theyeti

Yep, I think that's the real scientific controversy here. "Spliters vs. Lumpers". I knew it had to be something more than just arguing about arbitrary nomenclature. I'll cast my lot with the splitters.

theyeti (now part of genus Homo)