Question about the meaning of "Human"

[HamdenRice]

Poll question: Question about the meaning of "Human"

I'll just make this a poll and try not to editorialize, but the idea is to ask whether DU's science junkies consider all other members of the genus, "Homo" to be "human" or not -- and hence, how long you think "humans" have existed.

On edit: I would appreciate it if you would, if you like, explain your vote.

Which statement most accurately reflects the scientific consensus:

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. hey! where's my 7,019 yr choice? damn pagan heathen librul fascist socialists

[enuegii]

2. I would think that all members of the genus...

Homo should be considered 'humans.' If you want to be specific in referring to *us*, then be specific: 'modern humans,' 'Homo sapiens,' etc.
Can't really see what all the fuss is about the matter on some threads here, unless there is some movement afoot to disenfranchise the Basques.

[HamdenRice]

3. Can you explain this?

Can you explain why you consider this creature, Homo habilis, human rather than a proto-human? And what is your definition of human?

[enuegii]

4. Would you call it a monkey?

Or an ape? Freeper?
On edit: Yes, I see your point, but I did make a distinction between modern and other humans.

[HamdenRice]

5. Freeper!

I would call it a proto-human, or a hominid.

I wouldn't call it human.

But one "Freeper" test and one "human" test are quite similar: If my daughter brought this creature home saying she wants to marry it, would I be happy to give the union my blessing?

In the case of both the Freeper and the Homo habilis, I wouldn't.

:rofl:

PS I don't actually have a daughter

[enuegii]

6. I do have a daughter, and no, I probably wouldn't

give my blessings to a proposed union between them.
Proto-human, hominid, I've no problem with that. I guess it depends on how specific you want (or need) to be.
It sure does have that Freeper aura about it, though.

[Odin2005]

23. IMO Habilis should be in the genus Australopithicus.

As I pointed out in my response to the OP. The only reason it got put into the genus Homo was because it was the first to make stone tools, in everything else it was an Australopithecine from the neck down, while Erectus was pretty much identical to us from the neck down.

[TZ]

7. By definition NO.

Being of the same genus (homo) is not the same as being the same species.IE being "human". I'll put it a different way..are housecats (felis domesticus) the same as Tigers? They are the same genus. Related but not the same.

[HamdenRice]

8. That's what I thought

I used the same analogy. And calling hominids "human," or lions and tigers, "cats," which even scientists sometimes do, is simply using a metaphor.

[Ediacara]

13. Tigers and housecats are not the same genus

Tigers are Panthera tigris. But they're both "cats."

[hunter]

9. I think genus "Homo" reflects our much over-inflated opinion of ourselves.

Homo sapien? Give me a break. If any intelligent life ever shows up here they'll call us something like Pan vulgaris, "the common ape," and they'll marvel at all the garbage we left behind.

We are clever apes, yes, but so long as we continue to destroy the environment that supports us our intelligence is debatable.

[Nihil]

20. Good point.

> I think genus "Homo" reflects our much over-inflated opinion of ourselves.

Even if not going as far as Pan vulgaris, recognising ourselves as
genus Pan rather than inventing a "special" category would wake a few people
up with regards to our true position in the world.

You can see that very thing in this thread with the "those ape-like things
can't be called human" type of comment. Pan pestis would be my suggestion ...

[frogmarch]

10. "homo" means "human being"

Excerpt from a New World Encyclopedia entry:

Homo is the genus that includes modern humans and their close extinct relatives, such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Members of Homo are distinguished from other hominids by an erect posture, a large cranium, two-footed gait, fully opposable thumbs, and well-developed tool-making ability.

The oldest fossils of Homo trace to at least 2.3 to 2.5 million years ago (Smithsonian 2007a). All species except Homo sapiens (modern humans) are extinct. Homo neanderthalensis, traditionally considered the last surviving relative, died out about 30,000 years ago, though dates as recent as 24,000 years ago have been proposed.

The word homo, the Latin name for "man" in the original sense of "human being," or "person," was chosen originally by Carolus Linnaeus in his classification system. The word "human" is from Latin humanus, an adjective cognate to homo.

(emphasis mine)

Whether one likes it nor not, we are not the only human species to have ever existed.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Homo_(genus)

[HamdenRice]

11. And lupus means wolf

That doesn't mean that a dog is a wolf, even though a dog is classified, Canis lupus familiaris (familiar wolf). Latin classifications are often poetic, metaphorical or just whimsical.

A recently classified dinosaur was named, Minotaurasaurus Ramachandrani, after Indian scientist V.S. Ramachandran, a spider has been named, Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi after rocker Neil Young, and another spider was named Stasimopus mendelai after Nelson Mandela. That's hardly definitive proof that the dinosaur was an Indian scientist or that either spider plays the guitar or was president of an African country.

The conventional view is that Homo is the genus name because these animals are "human-like" or "proto-humans" and are our closest relatives. Most of these animals are referred to has "hominids" not human, by most scientists, unless they are speaking metaphorically.

Btw, the Latin root, "homo," also is related to the root of "humus" or soil. There is a lot of speculation about why the called labeled people with the word "soil," and some theories include, because human bury their dead in the earth, because humans cultivate the soil, because most humans were serfs bound to the soil, or in the sense of people being "earthlings" compared to the gods who lived in the heavens rather than on earth.

So beside the semantic origin, what is your definition of "human" and why do you consider this creature to be human?

[frogmarch]

15. Yes, "lupus" means "wolf," but

dogs belong to the genus Canis not Lupus. Dogs are descended from the grey wolf and are classified as a sub-species of wolf (Canis lupus familiaris), but they are not wolves.

On the other hand, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and all other Homo forms belong to the same genus that we modern humans do. They were, like we are, human.

What sets humans apart from all other primates is our ability to walk upright. Australopithecines may have had a quasi-bipedal gait, but according to fossil evidence, they weren't fully bipedal. Fossil evidence indicates that H. habilis was fully bipedal. H. habilis also had a larger brain than did australopithecines, and the structure of its hand bones - along with the presence of worked stones often found in association with H. habilis fossils, suggest that this early species of Homo made and used primitive tools.

I consider upright posture, bipedalism, a relatively large brain capacity compared to other primates, and evidence of tool-making to be the main qualifications for an archaic primate to be considered human - regardless of whether or not our species descended from any of the primitive bipedal, large-brained, tool-making primates whose fossils have been found so far.

[HamdenRice]

16. Interesting

I think a lot of people draw the line at language and symbolic thinking. That's why I think many who think that only homo sapiens are truly human and that think Neanderthals are not homo sapiens, would nevertheless call Neanderthals human -- because they clearly had some form of symbolic thinking.

The other Homo species, I don't think so.

[frogmarch]

17. Neanderthals apparently had the ability to speak.

NYT article snip:

Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.

The new evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language. The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.

The genes of Neanderthals seemed to have passed into oblivion when they vanished from their last refuges in Spain and Portugal some 30,000 years ago, almost certainly driven to extinction by modern humans. But recent work by Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has made it clear that some Neanderthal DNA can be extracted from fossils.

Dr. Paabo, Dr. Johannes Krause and Spanish colleagues who excavated the new bones say they have now extracted the Neanderthal version of the relevant part of the FOXP2 gene. It is the same as the *human version, they report in today’s issue of Current Biology.

*modern human as opposed to archaic human (referred to in the first paragraph).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/science/19speech.html?ex=1350360000&en=6ce43ba5748a26fc&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[HamdenRice]

18. Even before this gene research, there was anatomical research...

that showed that they could speak. IIRC it had to do with a bone that anchors the vocal chord.

That said, in the wake of the structuralist linguistic revolution, it's not clear that the ability to make words and communicate complex sets of symbols for things, is anything like human speech; because the most fundamental component of "human" speech is a certain "deep grammar," which appears to be hardwired into the human brain. That grammar is universal across cultures, and both enables and limits what we can think. Even twins who develop "secret" languages, colonies of the deaf who invent their own sign language, and other anomalous human examples display the same grammar.

Chimps and gorillas can be taught to communicate in fairly complex ways, but they don't seem to grasp human grammar.

Whether Neanderthals had that grammar is something we'll never be able to know.

[frogmarch]

19. This "deep grammer" as

you call it, is associated with the FOXP2 gene, which Neanderthals possessed. The gene has nothing to do with the physical mechanics of speaking, but with language itself.

[Ediacara]

12. "Human" to me means this clade:

"The most inclusive clade containing Homo sapiens, but not Pan paniscus."

Which would include everything in Homo, as well as Australopithicus, Paranthropus, Ardipithecus, and some others.

ON EDIT: I am not sure what led to this thread, but it seems that wishy-washy language is responsible for the vast differences in definitions to the purely vernacular term "human." This wishy-washiness is what led to scientific naming in the first place, and why there are, for instance, three different bird species on three different continents that are unrelated, but are all called "robins."

Vernacular terms are subjective, and we apply them as we see best. Since there are no other species of Homininans around, the vernacular definition of humans is pretty abstract. I would suggest though that if they were around, we'd have a broader definition of human. "Dog" can mean Canis lupis familiaris, but most people also consider foxes and coyotes and wolves types of dogs. Same with cats, a "cat" can be Canis familiaris, but most people also consider lynxes, lions, bobcats, and sabercats to be cats also.

Which brings us to a slightly less subjective, but still subjective term: genus. What is a genus really? It's an artificial construct created by scientists for better bookkeeping. If it were up to me, I'd scrap the genus altogether and go straight for a mononomial. Without a genericometer, there's no real reason that all of Hominina can't be considered part of the genus Homo, or conversely, why the genus Homo needs any other species besides H. sapiens.

The only truly real entities in biology are the species (which has its issues) and the clade. I happen to be a cladist, that's why I chose a cladistic definition of human, and I hope I have given some insight into why.

Your results may vary.

[Orsino]

14. Genus homo in popular scientific writing.

I see that meaning all the time.

I guess the point is that if you could meet a member of the other species, you might be hard-pressed not to think of him/her as human. H. habilis? Maybe not--but the lines we might wish to draw are probably fuzzy ones.

[Phoonzang]

21. I always use "human" to mean Homo Sapiens only.

So Neanderthals or Homo Erectus wouldn't be human. They'd be another hominid species. I'm not sure why the definition is worth arguing over. Unless one is saying there's less value in an intelligent species because they're not human...

[Odin2005]

22. I've seen both meanings used, though I prefer the broader definition.

Most common animal and plant names generally refer to whole genera (Felis = Cat) while more exact names refer to species and subspecies (Felis silvestris lybica = domesticated cat}. Also, "homo" is Latin for "human' ("human" itself comes from the adjective "humanus", which is derived from "homo") so it makes sense to use the word to mean the whole genus.

On a related note, IMO Homo habilis should really be Australopithicus habilis, it was essentially an australopithecine with a bigger brain, with long arms, short legs, chimp-sized body, and a huge degree of sexual dimorphism. H. erectus, on the other hand, was essentially identical to us below the neck. This is because the transition from Australopithecine to Human was a transition in ecological niche from open woodland omnivore-frugivore (basically bipedal chimps) to savanna generalist omnivore. That shift in niche is most likely when we lost our fur, became the sweatiest mammal on the planet, and got our projecting noses. The human body is supremely adapted for endurance in semi-arid tropical environments. As long as the humidity is low and we drink enough fluids we can tolerate midday tropical heat that would drive most other mammals to look for shade.