What clade do you believe you are part of?
Asked by
ETpro (
34605
)
July 23rd, 2010
If you think I am asking because I just stumbled across the word, clade and had to look it up, you get a Sherlock Holmes award. I come across unfamiliar words often in reading, and as often as I can, I look them up. But it is a rarity for me to hit one that is both new to me and a common English word of 5 letters or less. Hey, even my word processor’s spell checker didn’t know it was a word. Give a guy a break!
Moderators, this is a legitimate question IMHO. After all, there is a great deal of debate out there about what the true answer to this question should be. So Flutherites, if you know what clade means, answer up. If you don’t know, look it up (link above), and chime in on the debate that Charles Darwin’s seminal work On the Origin of Species touched off. By what clade were you made?
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29 Answers
What? Are you calling me a monkey?!? Them’s fightin’ words!
I am a descendant of Abraham and Sarah, parents of Isaac and Jacob.
I thought I came from blue-green algae, but I read an interesting bit in Discover magazine (April 2010, page 80) at the doctor’s office that made me think otherwise:
“Scientists suspect that a large DNA-based virus took up residence inside a bacterial cell more than a billion years ago to create the first cell nucleus. If so, then we are all descended from viruses.”
@Rarebear I think “toaster” is the correct answer, from what I learned a few years ago, right?
edit my previous: parents of—> ancestors of
Jellyfish. No, seriously.
@Dr_Lawrence Jacob was Sarah and Abraham’s son. Sarah was his wife, right? Isaac was the son of Abraham and his housemaid….what was her name? Islam traces their roots back to Jacob, Christianity claim Isaac. I think. I thinketh all this stuff.
Help me out…there was a science story on some fossilized remains they found this year, in which they thought they might have found a common ancestor for both apes and humans..what was that?
Going by Darwin’s idea that selection is a pivotal part of evolution and has phases through the ages through this selection business, I suppose I left off from the first Gaul who decided it was a good idea not to get wasted by the Romans and joined up with them or escaped somewhere and then started a family with a Viking, or maybe just the first dude who managed to not get decapitated during the French Revolution or was part of all those Frenchmen who got the boot and founded La Nouvelle France.
I don’t know enough about science or history to make an educated guess, but otherwise I’m guessing ultimately we all came from one source. Not sure what that is either.
I’m still stuck on the whole idea that all our grand pappies were cannibals.
It makes me wonder just exactly what kind of world it would be if neanderthals had taken the world instead of us, or at least what it would be like if they didn’t completely die out and lived as second race of humans alongside us. O_o
@Symbeline What do you mean “I’m still stuck on the whole idea that all our grand pappies were cannibals.”?
I guess I have to go with @Rarebear who said “Lobe finned fish….” But something came before that.
@Dutchess_III It was something that Cirbryn talked about once. He hates cladistics and uses lobed finned fishes as an example of why it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
@Dutchess_III About cro magnons and neanderthals. It isn’t related to this no, but just a thought that came up.
Thanks and :-) to all who played.
@wundayatta Ha! I just asked. Youse de one said monkey.
@Dr_Lawrence Surely you’re out on a limb with than answer
@Rarebear You must have had to root around for that answer.
@Jeruba Surely your clade would be a far more advanced group of taxa than that. You of all people. Now there are those I might believe when they said that.
@TheOnlyNeffie How can a fellow jelly possibly argue with that?
@Dutchess_If we want to claim a single, unconnected branch, wouldn’t we at least have to go back to our mitochondrial Eve? As to recent finds, check this discussion out.
@Symbeline Going with Darwin, we’d need to dial back to select a group that takes in all the taxa who share our direct original ancestor and excludes all taxa not descended from that early ancestor.
@ETpro Ahh, so no Viking for me then? XD
@Symbeline To my eyes, you have every appearance of being part of the Hominidae, and a very beautiful, contemplative looking one I might add.
@Dutchess_III You can’t expect me to take seriously someone I can keep from hitting me by putting my hand on her head and holding her at arms length.
@ETpro I just asked if you were calling me a monkey. I didn’t say I wasn’t one. The 100th one.
A clade consists of a given ancestor and all its descendants. Put another way, a clade is a branch of the evolutionary tree of life. So humans are members of many clades, depending on which ancestor we look at. We are in the great ape clade, which is part of the ape clade, which is part of the primate clade, which is part of the euarchontoglires clade, which is part of the mammal clade… and so on back through synapsid reptiles, early amphibians, lobe finned fish, and on back to the first lifeform.
As Rarebear mentioned (sorry, still haven’t figured out how to link to specific comments yet), I don’t like cladistics, although I don’t really have a problem with clades themselves. Cladistics involves organizing all lifeforms according to the clades they belong to. I might reasonably want to talk about a specific clade, such as the lobe-finned fish clade for instance, and in that case the idea of clades is useful. But I might also want to talk about lobe-finned fish separately from, say, humans, based on their noticeably different characteristics. I can’t really do that with a cladistic taxonomic system without resorting to awkward phrases such as “non-tetrapod lobe finned fish” or some such.
The problem gets particularly bad when we look at species. For instance, polar bears evolved from brown bears, so cladistically speaking they’re just a minor branch of the brown bear clade. (Link) This completely fails to acknowledge the fact that polar bears have clear morphological differences from brown bears, and that they don’t interbreed with brown bears any more, meaning that they will evolve independently of brown bears in the future. Under a Linnaean taxonomic system, polar bears can clearly be seen as unique and worth preserving. Under a cladistic system, the unique qualities that make polar bears polar bears are largely ignored.
@Cirbryn If I forgot to say this, welcome to Fluther. You can reference an answer above yours by typing in the at symbol. So long as there is no text after it, a drop-down list of screen names will appear. Pick the screen name you wish to respond to. There is a way to reference a specific answer further up the chain if the poster has several extraneous posts below it, but that requires more fancy footwork. This tip will do for now.
As to clades, I beg to differ on the broadness of the term. See the illustration at the top of Wikipedia’s definition for the reason humans would not be part of a clade that includes the ancestor of hominids.
@ETpro Just letting you know you’re walking on dangerous territory on arguing clades with Cirbryn. He’s a professional biologist and is an expert on this. You have been warned…
@ETpro You have been warned….Got popcorn, sitting back to watch :)
@Rarebear I was gonna say, I felt like I just walked into my own living room with a discussion in progress. Hand Maids Tale anyone?
@ETpro Hey, it works! Thanks!
Regarding the Wiki illustration, I don’t think that indicates that humans wouldn’t be part of a clade that included the ancestor of hominids. The main point of the illustration is that a clade must include all the descendants of a given ancestor. So the blue and orange shaded portions of the tree are clades, but the green area is not. (It’s just a portion of a clade.)
So if we go back to the ancestor of hominids, and define that species as the base for a clade, then the clade has to include that species and every descendant. Since we are hominids, we must be one of those descendants. Hence such a clade would include us.
Regarding Rarebear’s comment: I am a biologist, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert on systematics. I have been known to express myself at length on this topic, however. Hence the warning.
@Cirbryn Thank you for furthering my understanding of my new word. It is a delight to learn its meaning in more detail, and now I see what you originally meant.
In return, let me acquaint you with how to link to a question from a user who has additional posts below the one you wish to target. This is a bit more nerdy, but very doable. What you need to do is open either a new tab, or use a separate browser. Copy the URL from the address bar where you want to post a link to the address bar of your new tab or other browser. Now scroll to find the answer you wish to target. If you are lucky, someone will have used the @username method and clicking their link up to it will throw its full address in the address bar. If you aren’t lucky, then go back to the target answer, mouse over the Flag as.. link under it without clicking the link, and note in the status bar at the bottom of your browser the number that appears before its closing /. If you substitute that number for the number of any other @username address for the same question, it is an exact URL to the target question. You can make a link of it you putting any anchor text you want inside quotes, immediately typing a colon after the closing quote then pasting in the URL you copied or derived.
Of course, the same link adding strategy works to put links to things like the Wikipedia article I referenced above.
@ETpro OK, I think I can use your method to link to your last post but I still don’t see how to link to it using the @ sign, like you did.
Thanks by the way. It’s a shame Fluther doesn’t seem to have a page to explain this kind of thing.
@Cirbryn Agreed. They have the tiny print sentence right below the answer text-area and the link at the end of it leads to a few more tricks. But lots of it we pick up by just experimenting around and passing on tricks as we learn them. The @ sign is a special character and when placed before a user name, forms an automatic link to the closest post above the answer it appears in.
I got a laugh out of @Rarebear & @Dutchess_III expressing concern for me getting my comeuppance. That is in fact what I am here for. Sure I love to pontificate, and sometimes I hope even shed a little light for others to profit from, but the primary thing is to learn. When I am in error, I want to know it, not just keep following the dead-end path. If you again catch me talking out of school, please don’t hesitate to let me know my error.
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