Animalia
Chordata
Mammalia
Primates
Hominidae
Homonini
Homo
Sapiens
That is you. And also me. I mean unless you are a robotic A.I. in which case congratulations! You're sentient! Or maybe your a super intelligent animal that has gained your incredible reading abilities through a genetic experiment gone awry... If that's the case I heartily recommend reading. Great fun. Personal favourites are Paradise Lost and anything by H.P. Lovecraft, just be sure to not take on board the religious convictions of John Milton or the astounding and disappointing racism of Lovecraft (future blog topic by the way).
Of course it could be that I'm the A.I. or the genetic experiment...
But back to the humans. That is your scientific classification. That is who you are. Homo sapiens for short or you could just use Homo for shorter but be aware of the context that you use it in.
Am I the only one that thinks it's quite nice that we have a little title? We have our own little name tag. Adorable. Of course such broad name tags can be problematic. I mean not all human beings look exactly alike so how different does someone have to be to stop being human? How do you decide who is human and who isn't? Are some people closer to being "real" humans than others?
(For those worried I'm about to go all Nazi-pure-blood-half-breeds-Aryans-social-cleansing crazy, fear not. Hopefully by the end you'll see that actually my philosophy is so different to Hitler's, if he were alive and had a computer and read this blog post he would be all like "NEIN!")
Well to understand exactly why we have a name tag to begin with we have to look at human psychology. I believe I've mentioned numerous times on this blog before (and if I haven't then I have missed out something pretty major...) that humans, like myself and yourself, like patterns. We strive to find patterns in everything. Look up pareidolia. Fascinating and also explains why people see Jesus in their toast or Elvis in a tea stain on a scatter cushion or all sorts of bizarre visions. Humans have evolved to see faces in random objects because it's helped us survive. Being able to quickly take in information about someone's face can help us to assess how to react in certain situations. It's made us the social animal we are! Our pattern recognition skills also lead to people seeing figures and shapes in the clouds and constellations and also help us recognise situations we have been in before and react in an appropriate manner to survive. It's kept us alive but also given us the potential to develop phobias so there are pros and cons but really the pros win out which is why we've kept these abilities.
So you see humans are built to try and find patterns in things. We like things organised not just chaotic information we don't know how to react to. This is why species are classified. We want little boxes that each and every species neatly fits into.
"Ok!" You say. "Let's get started! If we start off simple... So how about things that live in the sea. They can all be fish..."
Ah no what about whales and dolphins and all them? They are actually pretty closely genetically related to stuff that doesn't live in the sea but other stuff that lives in the sea like plankton are way different. Also can you really call plankton and deep sea angler fish BOTH fish? They are super different.
"Ok... So where things live and what they look like aren't going to cut it because we have genetics and stuff... Hey! Why don't we use genetics to classify animals?"
Hey that's a grea- No wait a minute. Subspecies.
"Subspecies?"
Subspecies. Subspecies are way hard to classify. When does a species become a subspecies? When does a subspecies become an entirely new species? Where do we draw the lines? If one group of animals gets separated from all of their little animal friends for a long enough period of time then that group can end up entirely different to how they originally were, but at what point are they different enough to be considered a new species?
There is a famous thought experiment that gets you to imagine a heap of sand. It asks, if you were to take a grain of sand at a time off of the heap at what point would it stop being a heap? When would it become, say, a pile of sand? Now really what this thought experiment is meant to illustrate is the vagueness of language, a lot of the common everyday words we use without considering it are actually incredibly vague. It's surprising we've made it this far quite frankly...
Now considering this experiment in regards to species and particularly classification using genetics we come to a stumbling block. If you were to take an individual and remove one exon (a piece of genetic material that codes for a protein (my A-level in biology has not gone to waste)) at a time, at what point would they stop being a human being? Remove a few genes, yeah ok, still basically human. Maybe the person will suffer some genetic problems like cystic fibrosis or something similar. Would anyone here suggest that someone with a genetic disorder like cystic fibrosis isn't human? I certainly wouldn't and if you do don't ever speak to me again.
Ever.
So if only a few changes isn't enough what about removing half of a human's genetic material? It would be basically impossible for anyone to say that the end result of such an experiment would be a human being. We share 50% of our DNA with bananas so it could well be that if you chose which genes you were taking out the result would be indistinguishable from a collection of banana DNA. More than 50% out and no longer human but what about 75% or 86.5%? Are they still human?
Now the tree of life is looking a bit complicated isn't it. The barriers between species are breaking down. If you can't decide if an individual is definitely one species how can you say that that species even really exists?
Example. There are 3 different species of zebra. 2 of those species have 8 subspecies. One subspecies of the Plains zebra (Equus quagga) is Burchell's zebra. Now it was believed that Burchell's zebra had gone extinct until it was found that another subspecies of zebra that lived in the same areas as Burchell's zebra had lived (the Damara zebra or Equus quagga antiquorum) was actually... the same zebra. Yes, the zebra that everyone thought had gone extinct didn't actually exist. Well it did but it wasn't some other different species that went extinct, it was still wandering around under a different name. Everyone thought there were two subpopulations of zebra until 2 guys looked at some old skins of the extinct "Burchell's zebra" and found they were the same as the Damara zebra. Now because the name Burchell's zebra is older than the Damara zebra, the Damara zebra is now called Burchell's zebra and the species that was called Burchell's zebra... well it still is called Burchell's zebra but it isn't extinct. Hooray?
Yeah the classification system isn't so rock solid. When was this mix-up of species discovered? 2004.
You must be asking yourself at this point "But why am I bothering to read all this? I'm a very busy person and the capitalist society we live in abhors wasted minutes that could be spent either producing or consuming. I haven't got time for internet words!" and in response I'll say "Don't worry, botched together, feel-good, bite-sized philosophy is just around the corner!"
The whole point of this post is to get you to consider that actually the whole idea of species classification is really very shaky. Science still isn't really exactly sure where the lines lie. If you base it on genetics you can run into problems like the heap of sand. It's been suggested we use reproductive capabilities but then again we have people that physically can't reproduce because of their genes and then people that choose not to reproduce. Do these individuals fall out of the classification table into a separate group labelled Misc.? It's also been put forward that no one parameter of classification will ever be good enough. The "Tree" of Life is more The "Headphones-Tangled-In-Your-Pocket".
Of Life.
I am inclined to agree with this latter idea. As said in a previous post, we are all merely growths of the same original biological organism (as far as we know). Every living thing can follow an ancestor down to a point where we all converge. Humans are just differently organised bananas and bananas are just differently organised plankton. All of us are living beings and in the grand scale of things are really pretty indistinguishable. We tend to forget that when we are walking through a forest, the trees aren't just a background landscape, they are just as much living things as the squirrels and birds that call them home just as much as we are living things. They may not behave or act or react in the same way as us but they are alive. What sort of ramifications can thinking like this have? Does being aware of the fact that we are surrounded by other living beings that are a mere few lines of coded proteins away change how we think of the world and of ourselves? Does it compel us to act and think differently? I'll leave you to think on that.
Hope I didn't lose you during that zebra stuff. I had the sources in front of me and it was a bit of a mind bender... And I told you I wouldn't go all Hitlery...
