If I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I should have done so.
I Googled the quote, and it begins:
I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character ... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none.
Thanks.
That's really interesting. I remember a number of threads in which I or another evo (VadeRetro, IIRC) posted this link, where creationists all agree that there is nothing intermediate between apes and people, they just disagree about which is which!
It's also interesting tht Linnaeus was worried about the ecclesiastics, 80-odd years before Lyell at al proved the Earth is *much* older than a simple-minded interpretation of Genesis would imply, and more than a century before Darwin.
Thanks, I hadn't encountered that quote before, I'll add it to my collection.
If the subject matter baffles anyone, read and ponder the essay, You Are An Ape.
The point is that there isn't a single defining characteristic of the ape family that humans do not also possess. In a real taxonomic sense, we are *still* apes, just ones of the human variety. (Just as we are still primates, still mammals, and still vertebrates.)
Put another way, our differences from our ape "cousins" are ones of degree (in some cases large degree), but not of kind.
In spite of this remarkable similarity, Gish continues to claim that the Java Man is an ape, while the Turkana Boy is a modern human. In his words, they are "very apelike" and "remarkably human" respectively. If a "human" and an "ape" that look almost identical aren't transitional fossils, what would be?
