"Jason" wrote in message
...
In article , "mel turner"
wrote:

[snip of much previous]
Thanks for your post. I agree that the classification that you mentioned
is the best way to classify animals and plants. I recall having to learn
some of the basic terms for major animal groups (eg canine, bovine, eg)
while in a college biology class. I agree with most all of the
classifications that have been made. I could not have done a better job.
It's not perfect and one of the other posters told me that various changes
(related to how plants and animals are classified) are made almost every
year. The only area of disagreement is the way that humans are classified.
It's my opinion that humans and apes should be in separate families due to
the differences between humans and apes.

But the point is that modern classifications aren't being based on
just the perceived amount of difference between organisms, but on the
relative recency of common ancestry as inferred from the detailed
patterns of shared features. For creationists, that can be read as
"_apparent_ recency of common ancestry". The methods of study and
analysis will work for them too, even if they don't accept the
evolutionary explanation for their results. The nested patterns are
evidently real, regardless of their explanation. Yes, humans have
become strikingly different in various ways from all their living
relatives, but these differences don't change our pattern of
["apparent"] relationships.

Humans and chimps and bonobos seem to form a group of closest living
relatives exclusive of gorillas, and humans, chimps/bonobos, and
gorillas are all closer to one another in turn than we all are to
orangutans. We and all the other great apes are nevertheless closer
to one another than we all are to gibbons. If one were to recognize an
"ape family" for all hominoid primates other than humans, or just for
the other "great apes", some members of that family [e.g., chimpanzees]
will be closer kin [genealogically, and/or genetically] to something
outside that "family" [i.e., us] than they are to any of the other
members of their "family". It kind of violates the whole idea of
trying to classify closest relatives together in the same groups.

I realize that evolutionists
don't agree with me related to this issue.

Actually, your disagreement is pretty irrelevant to evolution vs.
creationism. "Creationist" or pre-evolutionary biologists such as
Linnaeus also classified humans and apes together, and before the
current trend toward strictly genealogical classification
["cladistics"], there were in fact plenty of evolutionary biologists
would also have agreed with you that humans had become "different
enough" from their ape relatives that they should be classified in a
separate family. The old distinction between "Pongidae" and Hominidae
was a matter of "grade inflation" as it were, to emphasize our
sense of our specialness among the other "apes". [Now, if it was a
chimpanzee or an orangutan that was doing the classifying they might
see _their_ species as the only truly special one...]

I realize that humans and apes
will continue to remain in the same family since evolutionists control the
classification process--Having apes and humans in the same family is in
harmony with evolution theory.

No, it's in harmony with the scientific evidence, and with principles
of phylogenetic classification.

Again, "creationist" biologists have also put humans and apes together,
and "evolutionist" ones have often artificially separated them in the
past. Further, even if you do want to put humans in a separate family
[presumably along with the various fossil "ape men"?], you'd probably
still put us together with apes in higher groups like Hominoidea,
Anthropoidea, Primates, Eutheria, Mammalia, Tetrapoda, Vertebrata,
Chordata, etc.. There seems little point to fussing about the Family
rank, if you accept all these other groups.

cheers