Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26184563-20130421015649/@comment-995426-20160429211928

Hulk10:

That's a better answer. I rely on my sources, and you rely on yours, and there's always the possibility for inconsistencies, especially as understandings of biological classification keep evolving and redrawing the cladogram.

But as I was saying before, if (for the sake of argument) the catarrhines apes evolved from can be considered monkeys, then even if apes aren't casually counted as monkeys (just like "birds are not dinosaurs" and "humans are not fish"), then it still necessarily follows that apes evolved from monkeys by virtue of catarrhine ancestors being monkeys. Polyphyly and paraphyly are largely relevant to naming conventions, but clade trees are relevant to genetic relation.

I know this simultaneously recognizes two different kinds of distinction&mdash;the layman's distinction and the cladistic distinction&mdash;which can make discussions seem rather muddled at times. The layman's distinction is more simply: "Why is a bird not a dinosaur?" "Because we don't think of it as one." The same argument that has people chiding other people for indiscriminately calling tortoises "turtles," even though all tortoises are actually turtles to the scientific sense, and it's actually turtles that are a paraphyletic category.