4 ms·

Sapiens by Yuval Harari defines "human" as "any member of the genus Homo". I don't know how common or accepted this definition is. It could become problematic

by dghf 10y ago

Sapiens by Yuval Harari defines "human" as "any member of the genus Homo". I don't know how common or accepted this definition is. It could become problematic if, as has been suggested, some or all of the other great apes are reclassified as Homo rather than Pan, Gorilla or Pongo.

gus_massa 10y ago
I think that this is the usual definition of "human", but I also think that it doesn't agree with the layman definition of "human". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human For a layman, an "human" is a "modern human", i.e. "Homo sapiens sapiens", i.e. me. There are two difficult problems here. The first is how to classify animals species (including humans, whatever it means). The taxonomy classification is somewhat arbitrary. It's very useful for discussions between biologist, but arbitrary. For an easy example, what is a kingdom looks like an easy question, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)#Summary Currently Homo, Pan, Gorilla or Pongo are different "genus" of the Hominidae "family". (I hope I got all the notation correctly.) The genus is somewhat special, because it's written in the name of the specie, but we could have agree to write the family in the name two. We could have been "H. H. sapiens sapiens" and chimps could be "H. P. troglodytes" The second problem is that we all agree that the sentence for killing a "human" should be different of the sentence for killing a cow or a pig. But the decision of what "human" means in that sentence is a political one, not a scientific one. Should we consider killing any great apes as bad as killing me? What about other apes? Why? Why must we use the taxonomy classification? What about whales and dolphins? Octopus?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > We could have been "H. H. sapiens sapiens" and chimps could be "H. P. troglodytes" Tangent, but if we ever genetically engineer some eldritch horrors, I vote to classify them as "H. P. lovecraft".
  - eliasbagley 10y ago
    There's a traditional of using Latin names for species classification, so maybe H. P. Lovecraftus

by dghf 10y ago

gus_massa 10y ago

I think that this is the usual definition of "human", but I also think that it doesn't agree with the layman definition of "human". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human For a layman, an "human" is a "modern human", i.e. "Homo sapiens sapiens", i.e. me. There are two difficult problems here. The first is how to classify animals species (including humans, whatever it means). The taxonomy classification is somewhat arbitrary. It's very useful for discussions between biologist, but arbitrary. For an easy example, what is a kingdom looks like an easy question, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)#Summary Currently Homo, Pan, Gorilla or Pongo are different "genus" of the Hominidae "family". (I hope I got all the notation correctly.) The genus is somewhat special, because it's written in the name of the specie, but we could have agree to write the family in the name two. We could have been "H. H. sapiens sapiens" and chimps could be "H. P. troglodytes" The second problem is that we all agree that the sentence for killing a "human" should be different of the sentence for killing a cow or a pig. But the decision of what "human" means in that sentence is a political one, not a scientific one. Should we consider killing any great apes as bad as killing me? What about other apes? Why? Why must we use the taxonomy classification? What about whales and dolphins? Octopus?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> We could have been "H. H. sapiens sapiens" and chimps could be "H. P. troglodytes" Tangent, but if we ever genetically engineer some eldritch horrors, I vote to classify them as "H. P. lovecraft".
- eliasbagley 10y ago
  There's a traditional of using Latin names for species classification, so maybe H. P. Lovecraftus