3 ms·

species A becomes subdivided into 2 variants Ax, Ay those being the same species, can mate (think for instance, citrus variants) but somehow they get separate

species A becomes subdivided into 2 variants Ax, Ay those being the same species, can mate (think for instance, citrus variants) but somehow they get separated, and start evolving slowly different, and here's the crux, at some point the genetic changes no longer allow viable reproduction should they mix again, at that point they have evolved into separate species it's not that Humans (Ax) came from ape (Ay) but rather they evolved out from some common ancestor (that may or may not still exists today) when they say "humans descend from apes" does not necessarily mean from actual current modern apes and the flaw in the child's reasoning is that presupposes a linear change "from this point on, we have humans, before, we have apes) that's enough simplification for a 5 year old?

trashtester 4y ago
> it's not that Humans (Ax) came from ape (Ay) but rather they evolved out from some common ancestor (that may or may not still exists today) She knows this already, I did show here pictures of Australopithecus(ape) and Homo Habilis (human). She knows that the mother of the first human was something like an Australopithecus, while the first human was something like Home Habilis. The problem is a logical one. Granted that one Homo Habilis was born from one Australopithecus, who would she mate with to have offspring? Would she commit bestiality with some Australopithecus of her tribe, or did in fact TWO such homo habilis suddenly appear in that tribe in the same generation? (And become Adam and Eve, or something.) The latter would, by common sense, seem to be extremely unlikely. I know the real science behind it. Clearly, the problem is to think about a species as a category that is invariant across time. The real answer is that "The category 'human' is not well defined over evolutionary time, so your question is absurd." That is good answer to a 15-year-old. But I was struggling to come up with a good explanation that would extend my methaphor in a way a 5-year-old might understand.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  With all due respect. I can’t make sense of this. Apparently, you have to be 15 to imagine gradual transitions between things (slush must be mind blowing for the little one), but 5 year olds are insisting you give thorough answers to questions about rarely-occurring abstract moral concepts like bestiality? I know a few five year olds, and I can’t imagine then asking questions like that or caring how sensible the answer is if they did. I guess their parents just haven’t been teaching them the things you’ve been teaching yours?
  - trashtester 4y ago
    > Apparently, you have to be 15 to imagine gradual transitions between things (slush must be mind blowing for the little one), She is unable to grasp time horizons over millions of years, and tell them apart from intuition that at best goes to 3 digits. Visualizing that the transition between Australopithecus and Homo Habilis as incremental steps over hundreds of thousands of years, I presume, is too hard for her (or for my ability to explain). Maybe she can do it before 15, but not yet, I think. Anyway, fact that we use taxonomies in the first place, is part of the problem. As long as we insist on giving names to ancient life forms, this type of question comes up by itself. > but 5 year olds are insisting you give thorough answers to questions about rarely-occurring abstract moral concepts like bestiality? Not explicitly. She is not aware of the concept. I suppose that's what she was asking. But obviously, it is implicit in the question, don't you think? If we insist in defining an individual as belonging to either Australopithecus or Homo, there must have been a time when someone we label as one mated with someone we label as the other. Obviously, I didn't give her that answer. But I did think it.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      > But obviously, it is implicit in the question, don't you think? If we insist in defining an individual as belonging to either Australopithecus or Homo, there must have been a time when someone we label as one mated with someone we label as the other. It’s implied that there must have been mating, but you’re the one deciding to complicate that with moral language like bestiality. If a horse and donkey, lion and tiger, dog and wolf, or two formally distinguished finch species mate, we just acknowledge it as two compatibly close species mating. You seem to be projecting your own sense of inviolate categories (maybe you imagine one being divinely ensouled and the other not?) instead of sticking in what the evidence speaks to directly. But that’s a different philosophical dilemma to reconcile.
      - trashtester 4y ago
        > maybe you imagine one being divinely ensouled and the other not? Not at all, I'm a pretty hardcore atheist. > projecting your own sense of inviolate categories Now, this is a good point. Even if I do not seen these categories as inviolate myself, mating between members of Genus Homo (aka 'Humans') and other animals is a social taboo, and punishable by up to three years in prison where I live. > If a horse and donkey, lion and tiger, dog and wolf, or two formally distinguished finch species mate, we just acknowledge it as two compatibly close species mating. All of these examples produce offspring that are not usually able to reproduce in the wolf, except dog and wolf who are both of the species Canis Lupus (with dog being the subspecies Canis Lupus Familiaris). I don't have a problem with the real science behind all of this. Indeed, I don't even think it makes sense to define a "first human", as every member of her tribe, both before and after should be categorized in the same category as her. Previously, I've been of the mind that, for a question like "Who cam first, the chicken or the egg?", the answer was obvious. Regardless of your definition of "Chicken", it did come from an egg. So the egg must have come first. Let's compare this to the difference between the colors "red" or "orange". Anything of wavelength above 780nm is considered red, anything below is considered orange. So let's say a "generation" of colors is 0.00001nm then 780.000005nm would be read and 779.999995 would be orange. Now, using the category definition strictly, we can make this distinction. Even if the bird that lay the first egg that would become a chicken were almost identical to the first chicken, we could chose a defintion that would make the mother belong to the category of not-a-chicken. But today, after thinking about this, it is a mistake to accept the question as well formulated. The term "chicken" is a social construct. At any point of time, a species can refer to a group of animals that would belong to the same species, had they lived today. Also, they would belong to the same species as their parents and grandparens at least a few generations back, probably hundreds if generations or more. In other words, my current opinion is that it does not make sense to make a definition of human vs ape very sharply. Instead, we need to accept that a spectrum exists between fully human and fully ape. Even if we choose to define a typical Homo Habilis as "fully human", there must have been their ancestors must have been near the middle of that spectrum, and even if we COULD define a set of criteria that would sharply split individuals between Homo Habilis and Australopithecus, that over some time period, proto-Homo animals must have been somewhere on that spectrum. (It has to be a spectrum, as just adding more categories would just move the category split somewhere else.)
- el_sinchi 4y ago
  it's not a "sudden" change there's no "first chicken", no "first human", no "last ape", no "first human that mated with last ape" either just gradual diverging changes , and then at some point one branch is different enough from other branch that we call them separate species so the answer to your connundrum is explaining your kid this, not explainign that a human mated with an ape (ELI5)
  - trashtester 4y ago
    So yes, I suppose my error was to assume that regardless of what definition you use for the category "Human", the mother of the first human must have been an ape. As I wrote in the other subthread, is that I should not have made the assumption that it doesn't make sense to make ANY defintion of "Human" sharp enough that a child belongs to the category and not the mother. In other words, the category "Human" has no sensible definition, and any attempt to make up an arbitrary one leads to such absurdities. Transferred to the chicken-and-egg problem. I've always held that it is clear that the egg came first, as regardless of your definition of "chicken" it came from an egg. But since I now belive that there cannot be a sensible definition of "chicken", the question turns from having an obvious answer to a question based on an absurd premise. Thx for pointing this out to me.

trashtester 4y ago

> it's not that Humans (Ax) came from ape (Ay) but rather they evolved out from some common ancestor (that may or may not still exists today) She knows this already, I did show here pictures of Australopithecus(ape) and Homo Habilis (human). She knows that the mother of the first human was something like an Australopithecus, while the first human was something like Home Habilis. The problem is a logical one. Granted that one Homo Habilis was born from one Australopithecus, who would she mate with to have offspring? Would she commit bestiality with some Australopithecus of her tribe, or did in fact TWO such homo habilis suddenly appear in that tribe in the same generation? (And become Adam and Eve, or something.) The latter would, by common sense, seem to be extremely unlikely. I know the real science behind it. Clearly, the problem is to think about a species as a category that is invariant across time. The real answer is that "The category 'human' is not well defined over evolutionary time, so your question is absurd." That is good answer to a 15-year-old. But I was struggling to come up with a good explanation that would extend my methaphor in a way a 5-year-old might understand.

swatcoder 4y ago
With all due respect. I can’t make sense of this. Apparently, you have to be 15 to imagine gradual transitions between things (slush must be mind blowing for the little one), but 5 year olds are insisting you give thorough answers to questions about rarely-occurring abstract moral concepts like bestiality? I know a few five year olds, and I can’t imagine then asking questions like that or caring how sensible the answer is if they did. I guess their parents just haven’t been teaching them the things you’ve been teaching yours?
- trashtester 4y ago
  > Apparently, you have to be 15 to imagine gradual transitions between things (slush must be mind blowing for the little one), She is unable to grasp time horizons over millions of years, and tell them apart from intuition that at best goes to 3 digits. Visualizing that the transition between Australopithecus and Homo Habilis as incremental steps over hundreds of thousands of years, I presume, is too hard for her (or for my ability to explain). Maybe she can do it before 15, but not yet, I think. Anyway, fact that we use taxonomies in the first place, is part of the problem. As long as we insist on giving names to ancient life forms, this type of question comes up by itself. > but 5 year olds are insisting you give thorough answers to questions about rarely-occurring abstract moral concepts like bestiality? Not explicitly. She is not aware of the concept. I suppose that's what she was asking. But obviously, it is implicit in the question, don't you think? If we insist in defining an individual as belonging to either Australopithecus or Homo, there must have been a time when someone we label as one mated with someone we label as the other. Obviously, I didn't give her that answer. But I did think it.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > But obviously, it is implicit in the question, don't you think? If we insist in defining an individual as belonging to either Australopithecus or Homo, there must have been a time when someone we label as one mated with someone we label as the other. It’s implied that there must have been mating, but you’re the one deciding to complicate that with moral language like bestiality. If a horse and donkey, lion and tiger, dog and wolf, or two formally distinguished finch species mate, we just acknowledge it as two compatibly close species mating. You seem to be projecting your own sense of inviolate categories (maybe you imagine one being divinely ensouled and the other not?) instead of sticking in what the evidence speaks to directly. But that’s a different philosophical dilemma to reconcile.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      > maybe you imagine one being divinely ensouled and the other not? Not at all, I'm a pretty hardcore atheist. > projecting your own sense of inviolate categories Now, this is a good point. Even if I do not seen these categories as inviolate myself, mating between members of Genus Homo (aka 'Humans') and other animals is a social taboo, and punishable by up to three years in prison where I live. > If a horse and donkey, lion and tiger, dog and wolf, or two formally distinguished finch species mate, we just acknowledge it as two compatibly close species mating. All of these examples produce offspring that are not usually able to reproduce in the wolf, except dog and wolf who are both of the species Canis Lupus (with dog being the subspecies Canis Lupus Familiaris). I don't have a problem with the real science behind all of this. Indeed, I don't even think it makes sense to define a "first human", as every member of her tribe, both before and after should be categorized in the same category as her. Previously, I've been of the mind that, for a question like "Who cam first, the chicken or the egg?", the answer was obvious. Regardless of your definition of "Chicken", it did come from an egg. So the egg must have come first. Let's compare this to the difference between the colors "red" or "orange". Anything of wavelength above 780nm is considered red, anything below is considered orange. So let's say a "generation" of colors is 0.00001nm then 780.000005nm would be read and 779.999995 would be orange. Now, using the category definition strictly, we can make this distinction. Even if the bird that lay the first egg that would become a chicken were almost identical to the first chicken, we could chose a defintion that would make the mother belong to the category of not-a-chicken. But today, after thinking about this, it is a mistake to accept the question as well formulated. The term "chicken" is a social construct. At any point of time, a species can refer to a group of animals that would belong to the same species, had they lived today. Also, they would belong to the same species as their parents and grandparens at least a few generations back, probably hundreds if generations or more. In other words, my current opinion is that it does not make sense to make a definition of human vs ape very sharply. Instead, we need to accept that a spectrum exists between fully human and fully ape. Even if we choose to define a typical Homo Habilis as "fully human", there must have been their ancestors must have been near the middle of that spectrum, and even if we COULD define a set of criteria that would sharply split individuals between Homo Habilis and Australopithecus, that over some time period, proto-Homo animals must have been somewhere on that spectrum. (It has to be a spectrum, as just adding more categories would just move the category split somewhere else.)
el_sinchi 4y ago
it's not a "sudden" change there's no "first chicken", no "first human", no "last ape", no "first human that mated with last ape" either just gradual diverging changes , and then at some point one branch is different enough from other branch that we call them separate species so the answer to your connundrum is explaining your kid this, not explainign that a human mated with an ape (ELI5)
- trashtester 4y ago
  So yes, I suppose my error was to assume that regardless of what definition you use for the category "Human", the mother of the first human must have been an ape. As I wrote in the other subthread, is that I should not have made the assumption that it doesn't make sense to make ANY defintion of "Human" sharp enough that a child belongs to the category and not the mother. In other words, the category "Human" has no sensible definition, and any attempt to make up an arbitrary one leads to such absurdities. Transferred to the chicken-and-egg problem. I've always held that it is clear that the egg came first, as regardless of your definition of "chicken" it came from an egg. But since I now belive that there cannot be a sensible definition of "chicken", the question turns from having an obvious answer to a question based on an absurd premise. Thx for pointing this out to me.