Apr/0914
If It Doesn’t Have a Tail It’s NOT a Monkey
The cubs are on spring break this week from school. Since I ran out of duct tape, I used yesterday’s wonderful weather to take them to the zoo.
We have a very good zoo here, and one of the money exhibits is the Gorilla Forest. We have 11 Western Lowland Gorillas, several of which are out on any given day.
Western Lowland Gorilla - Photo taken by Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo July, 2005
While I was watching the gorillas, there was a young woman standing next to me, holding a little girl (her daughter, I assume) who was maybe 4 years old. The woman pointed at one of the female gorillas right in front of where I was standing, and loudly said “Honey, look at the monkey!” My teeth clenched, and I could feel my blood pressure going up – it was all I could do to avoid correcting her. In retrospect, I should have set things straight. Gorillas are apes, of course, not monkeys.
The easiest way to remember the difference is that monkeys have tails and apes don’t – a fact that even singing vegetables fruits1 can get right (Thanks, A. It’s stuck in my head again…):
If a cucumber and a tomato can sort this out, there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be able to keep it straight, especially since there are informational placards all over the exhibit that drive the point home. Sure, apes and monkeys are related, but that doesn’t mean they’re interchangeable.
To help illustrate the point, I’ve drawn a very rough partial phylogenetic tree of the primates (I left off the branches for tarsiers and lemurs), based on the excellent data at the Tree of Life Web Project.
Partial Primate Phylogeny. I make no claim to be an artist.
Reading left to right, we can see that the New World Monkeys shared a common ancestor with the lower branches, then the Old World Monkeys shared a (more recent) common ancestor with the branch that forks off to Apes and Gibbons. The common ancestor of Apes and Gibbons was more recent than the ancestor they shared with the OWMs. (I’ll discuss diagrams like this in more detail in another post – they’re interesting in general, but the details aren’t crucial here.)
In the final analysis, did the zoo-mom’s gaffe really make a difference? I don’t know – probably not. The gorilla didn’t seem too upset at being called a monkey, the little girl probably won’t remember the comment, and I certainly appreciate the mom spending time with her child on a spring afternoon. On the other hand, maybe if people in general were a little more careful and precise, it might help foster a curiosity and interest in science among children that seems to be lacking these days.
CB
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1I would never have anticipated that I’d be using a video of singing salad to illustrate a point about primate phylogenies…
April 3rd, 2009
You’re welcome!
I grew up thinking that all primates were monkeys (nobody bothered to teach me otherwise), but I know that the little girls who introduced me to this song will grow up knowing the difference.
Although I find it most ironic that most of the stars of VeggieTales are technically fruit…
April 3rd, 2009
I’d have picked the more-accurate-but-less-catchy “ProduceTales” as a title…
April 3rd, 2009
I’m not even going to click on the song. It’s bad enough that I started spontaneously singing “Hey, Hey, we’re the Monkees” on my way into work today.
Purely coincidentally. I had no psychic intuitions that I was going to read this particular blog entry today.
I would probably at least have been growling “Grrrr-rillas” under my breath though, had I been confronted with the same situation. Self-restraint seems not to run in the Pinhead clan.
April 4th, 2009
I’m pretty sure my older brothers drilled the “monkey vs. ape” thing into my head at a fairly young age in response to a gaffe on my part while watching “King Kong Lives”.
April 4th, 2009
Stevie -
The kids I had with me (my two plus the one of my daughter’s friends) got the monkey/ape lecture as we were moving to the next exhibit.
I should have spoken up – in a smaller crowd I would have.
April 6th, 2009
CB-
If you had spoken up, then there might be a post about you on her blog about the know-it-all guy who embarrassed her in front of her daughter and ruined her outing! You never know…
April 6th, 2009
I could probably manage to say it politely…
April 11th, 2009
This is one issue I'm always a bit divided on about correcting when I hear people make this mistake. If this occurred in a zoo setting I would likely have made the correction.
The situation where it is more difficult is when talking to creationists, especially YECs. Under certain circumstances, it is rhetorically useful to make the YECs (or bystanders who are watching) understand that the YECs know so little biology that they can't get basic terminology right . However, if this isn't done right it comes across as condescending nitpicking.
Incidentally, I'm not sure I like that video from a pedagogical perspective. It seems to combine two separate lessons: correct classification of monkeys and apes and correct use of binary attributes in classifying. However, the combination of the two could possibly confuse children who are watching. In particular, I suspect that many children will come away from watching that video without a clear understanding that apes are in fact the monkey-shaped beings without tales.
April 13th, 2009
If I start another blog, it's going to be named The Condescending Nitpicker.
Honestly, the last thing I want to do is ruin someone's day by causing a scene in a zoo. In a very small crowd, I'd probably offer a comment. If someone happens to ask me a question, I'd certainly answer. In a large group of random people, the situation could turn sour pretty fast.
I thought the video was useful in that it gets across a significant point, although it has some weaknesses. In addition to the one you mentioned, very small children won't get the joke at the end with the cow, and may conclude that anything with a tail is a monkey. If it had proceded as:
IF ((monkey shaped) AND (has tail)) THEN (monkey)
ELSE
IF ((monkey shaped) AND (no tail)) THEN (ape)
It might have been more technically accurate, and probably wouldn't still be stuck in my head.
June 1st, 2009
Related experience: I was recently with 'cubs' on a night hike. The Va. park ranger gave a 30 min preparatory talk. Great stuff: insightful, knowledgable, and interesting for young and old. One factoid among many. He mentioned that bats used to belong to the rodent classification when he was growing up, but have now been moved to the family that includes humans because of their true opposible thumbs. Some primates come close, but apparently only bats have true opposible thumbs. 'They're no humans, of course, they're still bats, but we catagorize by characteristics."
Cue great hike, owl calling, frog calling experience. At the end of the hike, in a properly contrite tone, this dedicated public servant apologized to us for implying that humans were animals and that he didn't mean to confuse the cubs with evolution. Evidently, one of the parents complained.
June 1st, 2009
Part II – Night Hike/Fossils
I wonder how these fragile, easily confused cubs reconciled these beliefs with the visitor center display and explaination of fossil sharks teeth from the Miocene period. We spent the day finding these on the day hike to aptly named Fossil Beach. Although come to think of it, I'm not sure these particular parents let their cubs in the visitor center… (apologize for length)
June 1st, 2009
Last thought: Pity the poor park ranger with his biology undergrad degree and his PhD in Education having to put up with these people. This man's day was supposed to end at 8:30 pm, but he took our large group of cubs, spent extra time, made them a campfire and stayed until 10:00 pm. Even if you disagree with his talk, why would you complain? (insert rant here) Did I mention there was no charge?
June 1st, 2009
He kind of over-simplified the bat thing. They're closer to primates than to rodents, but they're still quite distinct. (I can't find any reference to bats having true opposable thumbs, either, but if they do, they're a homologous feature.)
Anyway, one of the things that greatly disturbs me is that a lot of the folks who deny evolution and get worked into a frenzy at the mere mention of it don't really even know what it is they're objecting to – they've been fed such a distorted version of it that they can't possibly form a valid opinion of the matter.
June 1st, 2009
One more point. Science, in my opinion, is often taught incorrectly.
My experience in high school was that you had a biology class in 9th grade that basically consisted of some basic anatomy and systematics/classification (and in the mid 1980s, even public schools were very cautious about teaching much about evolution – I suspect the 1982 McLean v. Arkansas case was still in the minds of school boards, and the easiest way to avoid a lawsuit would have been to downplay the entire topic). 10th grade was general chemistry. 11th grade, if you were in the right track was physics. It’s not difficult to see how people could find themselves in a college level biology class hearing about evolution for the first time. If you’ve been raised in a culture that denies evolution, I can imagine that would be a very uncomfortable experience.
The problem is that biology (at a cell level) is largely applied chemistry and chemistry is basically applied physics, and it’s important to be aware of those connections (not in excruciating detail really, but in broad overview). This didn’t click solidly for me until well into college, when I was fortunate enough to have an organic chemistry professor whose research area was antiretrovirals at the same time that I was taking cell biology, and the lecture discussions overlapped.
Anyway, I think that if people were taught the connections and dependencies between scientific fields, they’d realize that when they go trying to attack evolution, they’re really attacking the chemistry and physics that’s at work behind the biology. Some groups will never do this, though, and will continue to produce folks who are inclined to complain about well-intentioned park rangers.