Clever Monkey
clades
The trouble started, as it often did at the International Conference on Systematic Taxonomy, with a cladogram.
Dr. Renata Voss had projected it on the screen behind her: a clean, forking tree of primate lineages rendered in crisp black lines, every node labeled, every branch annotated. She stood at the podium in Ballroom C of the Raleigh Convention Center, laser pointer in hand, and she had not yet finished her second sentence before someone in the fourth row cleared his throat with unmistakable aggression.
“If we could hold questions until the end,” Voss said.
“It’s not a question,” said Dr. Peter Chandler-Rao, already half-standing. “It’s a correction. Your slide title says ‘Apes and Their Relatives.’ Humans are apes. You’ve drawn humans outside the ape clade.”
“I have drawn humans exactly where they belong,” Voss said. “Within Hominoidea. Which is clearly indicated on the diagram.”
“Then the title is redundant.”
“The title is pedagogical.”
A murmur rippled through the room. Conference veterans recognized the weather pattern. Two low-pressure systems were colliding, and everyone in Ballroom C was about to get wet.
Chandler-Rao’s contingent occupied the left side of the aisle: younger, louder, partial to monophyletic absolutism. Their position was straightforward. Simiiformes, the infraorder containing all monkeys and apes, was a single clade. Every descendant of the last common ancestor of that group was, in the strictest phylogenetic sense, a monkey. Apes were monkeys. Humans were apes. Therefore, humans were monkeys. The logic was airtight, the taxonomy was consistent, and the traditional categories were sentimental artifacts that deserved to be retired.
Voss’s faction held the right side, and they held it with the quiet tenacity of people who had been publishing longer. Their counterargument was not that the phylogeny was wrong but that the word “monkey” had never referred to a monophyletic group in the first place. Old World monkeys were more closely related to apes than to New World monkeys. The term was paraphyletic, a grade rather than a clade, and insisting on calling humans monkeys was not a triumph of rigor. It was a category error dressed up as one.
“You’re privileging common names over phylogenetic structure,” Chandler-Rao said. He was fully standing now, his conference lanyard swinging. “If we accept that birds are dinosaurs, and we do, then the same logic applies. Humans are monkeys.”
“Birds are dinosaurs because Dinosauria is monophyletic,” Voss replied. “Monkey is not a formal taxonomic rank. It never has been. You’re drawing an analogy between a clade and a colloquialism.”
“Simian is a formal term.”
“Simian refers to Simiiformes, which includes apes. I don’t dispute that. I dispute the rhetorical leap from ‘member of Simiiformes’ to ‘is a monkey,’ because those are different claims with different semantic content.”
Dr. Alice Yun, seated near the back with the neutrals, leaned over to her colleague. “Twenty minutes. I had the over.”
Her colleague passed her a five-dollar bill without looking away from the spectacle.
The debate sharpened. Chandler-Rao’s postdoc, a wiry man named Sepúlveda, stood to argue that paraphyletic groupings were inherently misleading and that the refusal to call humans monkeys was anthropocentric vanity. Voss’s longtime collaborator, Dr. Miriam Tanaka, countered that language served communication, that “monkey” conveyed a specific morphological and behavioral gestalt to both scientists and the public, and that flattening that meaning in the name of cladistic purity made taxonomy worse at its actual job.
“You want taxonomy to be imprecise because precision makes people uncomfortable,” Sepúlveda said.
“I want taxonomy to be useful,” Tanaka said. “A system that tells a first-year biology student that she is a monkey has failed as communication, whatever its merits as philosophy.”
“That’s an appeal to ignorance.”
“It’s an appeal to pedagogy, which is the stated purpose of this conference.”
Voss reclaimed the podium. “We are not going to resolve the monophyly debate in Ballroom C on a Thursday afternoon. What I am proposing in this talk is a framework for communicating evolutionary relationships to nonspecialist audiences without either sacrificing accuracy or generating confusion. If we could return to slide four...”
She did not get to slide four.
The door at the back of the ballroom opened with a slow, heavy creak. A woman in a visitor badge stepped through, holding the hand of a small child, perhaps five or six years old. The woman mouthed “sorry” and guided the child toward an empty seat near the back row. The child climbed up, legs dangling well above the floor, and surveyed the room with the calm, judicial attention of someone who had been promised lunch after this.
Chandler-Rao, mid-sentence, paused. The child was staring at the cladogram on the screen with evident interest.
“Are we monkeys?” the child asked. The question was directed at no one and everyone. The room, which had been a theater of controlled academic hostility for the better part of an hour, went silent.
Voss opened her mouth. Chandler-Rao opened his. Sepúlveda inhaled.
The child looked at her mother, then back at the screen, then at the assembled doctors of phylogenetic science. She appeared to consider the matter with great seriousness.
“I think we’re monkeys,” she said. “Monkey is a funnier word.”
Dr. Alice Yun laughed first. Then Tanaka. Then, against what appeared to be his own will, Chandler-Rao. The sound spread through Ballroom C like a pressure valve releasing, and for a few seconds, the International Conference on Systematic Taxonomy sounded like a place where people were enjoying themselves.
Voss looked at the child, then at her cladogram, then at the room full of her peers and rivals. She clicked to slide four.
“Monkey it is,” she said. “Now. If we could discuss the actual topic of my presentation.”
Nobody objected.