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On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:38:49 -0600, in alt.talk.creationism
"Mark K. Bilbo" wrote in
:
In , David Jensen
wrote:

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:03:07 -0800, in alt.talk.creationism
(Jason) wrote in
:
In article , "mel turner"
wrote:

"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

Mel,
Thanks for your interesting post.

Ah, that's Jason's patented brushoff. Jason will repeat his false claim as
if Mel's post had never happened, yet he wonders why he is called a liar.

I'm not so sure it's lying so much as he's so far in over his head, he's
not even sure what's going on...

I do understand that, but I have noticed that Jason has a pattern of
being unable to remember correctly any post that he called
'interesting'. It is possible that it does not mean what he thinks it
means.