Yep. People are a type of animal. The type of animal is mammal. The type of mammal is clearly ape. We didn’t descend from apes; we are a kind of ape.
Wagstaff
Our early human ancestors still counted as apes. The first ape, however, was born from a primate that wasn’t quite an ape.
milu
yeah, they were so smug about it, too.
“i don’t care mom, i’m an ape”
“and i’m 99.98% an ape and so what?!? stop being so damn cocky. kids today, sheesh.”
(DISCLAIMER THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS NOT HOW BIOLOGY WORKS)
Deanatay
No, that is not how biology works.
Clearly, the mom bent her big toe so much that her kids came out with their big toes twisted around. THAT’S how biology works!
(it’s not how biology works in that there is no single “first ape”. that’s not the order of precision that paleontology operates on)
Wagstaff
The way I see it, whatever minimum biological features are necessary for something to qualify as an “ape”, the first creature to satisfy all those criteria would had to have been born from something whose biological features didn’t quite fulfill the minimum “ape” requirements.
So, whatever creature in the past qualifies as the “first ape” really depends on how you define “ape” within this context.
At least, that’s how I understand this, but I could be wrong.
By the way, do you really live in Amsterdam?
If not, mind if you give me a Carmen Sandiego style riddle for the right answer?
milu
i feel like there’s a philosophical, or epistemological issue here regarding the definition of a species, so i don’t think what you describe makes sense, because a) a species is a population not an individual, b) speciation happens over quite a few generations, it’s a fuzzy process, and perhaps most importantly c) the definition of what constitutes a species itself is a whole ball of fuzz which is only useful to the extent we accept that it is an approximation of reality, one that does not map onto reality 1:1.
hmmmm i haven’t played Carmen Sandiego in so many years i don’t really remember what the clues were like, but ok, here goes. there’s a white peacock. there’s an almost total solar eclipse this decade. someone famously wrote something frustratingly incomplete.
Wagstaff
Is it Spain?
milu
nope =)
Wagstaff
All I know for sure so far is that you live in Europe.
Not that there’s anything wrong, but recreational use of cannabis isn’t technically legal where you are, is it?
milu
nope!
insomniac
Wagstaff:
So, okay. What we’re running into here is, philosophically, referred to as “the problem of the heap.”
If I see a pile of gravel three feet tall, that’s a heap of gravel. If I see a piece of gravel on the ground, that is not a heap.
If I add a second piece of gravel, that’s two pieces of gravel. If I add a third, that’s three pieces. If I keep adding gravel, eventually I’ll have a heap of gravel. But it’s… Strange, at least, to try and make a precise definition for “how many pieces of gravel does it take to make a heap.” (Or in reverse: “I have a heap of gravel, I take a piece of gravel off, is it still a heap.”)
That’s the sort of definition you get into when you try to mark out whether an animal is or is not an ape. The animal is what it is; “ape” is a useful category we made up to talk about it in the context of other animals that are similar in some ways.
I nearly got my head torn off by one of my coworkers when I worked at Wal-Mart because I stated the scientific fact that humans are animals. She said that I may be an animal, but she wasn’t! And this was a woman well into her 50’s or 60’s at the time.
Pickman
Well, there are other realms she could belong to. Let her self-identify.
Wagstaff
You don’t by any chance happen to live in the US Bible Belt, do you?
Yeah, I largely called it the buckle not because of religious fervor(I would say Missouri or Tennessee probably has us beat) but by sheer size. (Dips into an exaggerated Texas drawl) I’m not sure if anybody has told you, but Texas is kind of a Big Place.
That and we still can’t really buy liquor on Sundays due to outdated Blue Laws. When I was in Branson, MO several years ago, I was shocked that I could buy moonshine, on a Sunday, from a Grocery Store! It was right next to the produce section!
George W Harris
Well, she’s clearly not a protist or bacterium, so that leaves plant or fungus.
I Appreciate You.
In primary school I said something about how they should be ape-bars because people are apes and EVERYONE LAUGHED AT ME because Obviously humans are Monkeys that’s Evolution Stupid.
anyway that was a formative memory for me.
Aethelred the Unready
Could be worse. In middle school the teacher asked everyone in class who believe in evolution to raise their hands, I was the only one who did.
Dang it, not all monkeys have tails! Barbary macaques are tailless.
The separation of simians into “monkeys” and “apes, which are descended from monkeys and much more closely related to Old World monkeys than any Old World monkey is to any New World monkey” is one of my biggest scientific pet peeves.
The last common ancestor of all apes was a monkey. Cladistically speaking – which is the only way of speaking that makes sense for this sort of thing – all apes ARE monkeys. It’s only arrogance that makes us want to say otherwise.
Joe requests an extension on the assignment because his partner is suddenly scarfing bananas and looking into whether she would be allowed to install a tire swing in her room.
Professor Brock grants it, because this isn’t his first rodeo and he actually considers the semester a disappointment if this doesn’t happen to at least a few students.
“We’re going to need an extension. My partner is facing an existential horror for the first time in her life. Yes, first time. It was hard for me to believe that as well.”
The realization is NOT fun. Especially because it comes with severing and rejecting all of the guidance you once relied on, and at times it feels like you can’t turn to anyone in your new, “enlightened” circles because they will have nothing but scorn for the idiot fundie who believed this crap for so long.
Joe’s not responsible for talking Joyce through this, but she very obviously needs SOMEONE to. It’s not something you untangle for 5 minutes before a homework project.
I’m not sure which stage of grief “I’M JUST A MONKEY!” is, could be anger, could be acceptance, but either way she’s going through them pretty quickly.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that what appears to be an eyelid in panels 3 and 4 kinda makes it look like Joe temporarily has two sets of eyebrows
Child abuse, proxy wars, regular wars, land mines, making suicide bombers, letting others starve so one person can have a fancy (car/pool/fingernails).
And yes, we also still fling poo and beat each other to death with our fists.
Jon
True, chimps don’t build explosives or have cars or pools.
Other than that, though, they’re on the list too. Relatives – whatcha gonna do?
Demoted Oblivious
Oh I don’t dispute that they’re on the list. Cannibalism, battles (maybe wars), murder, and I would guess rape? But to my knowledge at least, they’ve not managed to do anything worse than us. Even if they annihilated a few species, they don’t have us beat for the worst.
Falcon
I don’t understand why people seem to think chimpanzees wouldn’t do many of these same things if they had the same mental and physical tools to build a civilization and technologically progress. We created wheelchairs and bandages, medicine and lightbulbs. We harnessed fire and wind and the sun itself. This same capacity is also what enabled us to commit genocides and crusades and all sorts of horrible stuff. If another species got to where we are, there’d be variations based on natural instincts and whatnot, but they’d likely have their own virtues and evils on a similar scale.
Actually, given the history of racist comparisons utilizing the word “monkey”, does the phrase, “well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” have a racist etymology? I mean, it’s typically somewhat speciesist at the least, but was/is it racist?
Please accept my apologies for any slight embedded in this. Causing hurt is not my intention.
Warren
Some cursory research indicates that no one really knows where the idiom comes from. A few different places (including Wikipedia) claim it started among early twentieth-century creationists mocking evolution, but they don’t have much in the way of citations.
This article cites a newspaper article that uses the phrase “monkey’s uncle” about 12 years before Darwin’s work, and the meaning of the phrase seems to match the modern meaning. Of course, as the article points out, evolution was still a major scientific hypothesis before Darwin figured out its methods, so the phrase could still be a reference to it (or the 1847 article could be etymologically unrelated; it’s entirely possible for two different people to independently decide that having simians in one’s family tree is amusing).
Long story short, I can’t find any evidence to suggest that “monkey’s uncle” came from xenophobic fears about interracial relationships or anything of that nature.
Demoted Oblivious
That’s cool! Thank you for your scholarly efforts.
Monkeys are a paraphyletic group anyway, and common vernacular calls apes “monkeys” often enough that it could be taken as an informal term, if you’re not bothered by being overly accurate.
On the other hand, Monkey Master would probably stomp you if you kept calling him a monkey and not an ape.
373 thoughts on “Unlearning”
Ana Chronistic
Joe: “Look! A three-headed monkey!”
Joyce: “ARRRRRRR!!!”
Ana Chronistic
Joe: “Look at you! You’ve got anxiety!”
Paul Grant
Actually, an ape. Monkeys have tails (unless Joyce is REALLY hiding something)
Clif
Yep. People are a type of animal. The type of animal is mammal. The type of mammal is clearly ape. We didn’t descend from apes; we are a kind of ape.
Wagstaff
Our early human ancestors still counted as apes. The first ape, however, was born from a primate that wasn’t quite an ape.
milu
yeah, they were so smug about it, too.
“i don’t care mom, i’m an ape”
“and i’m 99.98% an ape and so what?!? stop being so damn cocky. kids today, sheesh.”
(DISCLAIMER THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS NOT HOW BIOLOGY WORKS)
Deanatay
No, that is not how biology works.
Clearly, the mom bent her big toe so much that her kids came out with their big toes twisted around. THAT’S how biology works!
(You can laugh, but Lamarckian evolution was a thing for a while.)
milu
(it’s not how biology works in that there is no single “first ape”. that’s not the order of precision that paleontology operates on)
Wagstaff
The way I see it, whatever minimum biological features are necessary for something to qualify as an “ape”, the first creature to satisfy all those criteria would had to have been born from something whose biological features didn’t quite fulfill the minimum “ape” requirements.
So, whatever creature in the past qualifies as the “first ape” really depends on how you define “ape” within this context.
At least, that’s how I understand this, but I could be wrong.
By the way, do you really live in Amsterdam?
If not, mind if you give me a Carmen Sandiego style riddle for the right answer?
milu
i feel like there’s a philosophical, or epistemological issue here regarding the definition of a species, so i don’t think what you describe makes sense, because a) a species is a population not an individual, b) speciation happens over quite a few generations, it’s a fuzzy process, and perhaps most importantly c) the definition of what constitutes a species itself is a whole ball of fuzz which is only useful to the extent we accept that it is an approximation of reality, one that does not map onto reality 1:1.
hmmmm i haven’t played Carmen Sandiego in so many years i don’t really remember what the clues were like, but ok, here goes. there’s a white peacock. there’s an almost total solar eclipse this decade. someone famously wrote something frustratingly incomplete.
Wagstaff
Is it Spain?
milu
nope =)
Wagstaff
All I know for sure so far is that you live in Europe.
Not that there’s anything wrong, but recreational use of cannabis isn’t technically legal where you are, is it?
milu
nope!
insomniac
Wagstaff:
So, okay. What we’re running into here is, philosophically, referred to as “the problem of the heap.”
If I see a pile of gravel three feet tall, that’s a heap of gravel. If I see a piece of gravel on the ground, that is not a heap.
If I add a second piece of gravel, that’s two pieces of gravel. If I add a third, that’s three pieces. If I keep adding gravel, eventually I’ll have a heap of gravel. But it’s… Strange, at least, to try and make a precise definition for “how many pieces of gravel does it take to make a heap.” (Or in reverse: “I have a heap of gravel, I take a piece of gravel off, is it still a heap.”)
That’s the sort of definition you get into when you try to mark out whether an animal is or is not an ape. The animal is what it is; “ape” is a useful category we made up to talk about it in the context of other animals that are similar in some ways.
TemplarKnight
I nearly got my head torn off by one of my coworkers when I worked at Wal-Mart because I stated the scientific fact that humans are animals. She said that I may be an animal, but she wasn’t! And this was a woman well into her 50’s or 60’s at the time.
Pickman
Well, there are other realms she could belong to. Let her self-identify.
Wagstaff
You don’t by any chance happen to live in the US Bible Belt, do you?
TemplarKnight
More like the Bible Belt Buckle. Texas.
Wagstaff
I don’t know about that. From what I’ve heard, Tennessee and Southern Ohio are much more intense candidates for the buckle.
eh, whatever
Fun fact: wherever in the US the atheist blogger PZ Myers goes, people tell him that’s the buckle of the Bible Belt.
TemplarKnight
Yeah, I largely called it the buckle not because of religious fervor(I would say Missouri or Tennessee probably has us beat) but by sheer size. (Dips into an exaggerated Texas drawl) I’m not sure if anybody has told you, but Texas is kind of a Big Place.
That and we still can’t really buy liquor on Sundays due to outdated Blue Laws. When I was in Branson, MO several years ago, I was shocked that I could buy moonshine, on a Sunday, from a Grocery Store! It was right next to the produce section!
George W Harris
Well, she’s clearly not a protist or bacterium, so that leaves plant or fungus.
Opus the Poet
Fungi can be really fun guys…
carms
I Appreciate You.
In primary school I said something about how they should be ape-bars because people are apes and EVERYONE LAUGHED AT ME because Obviously humans are Monkeys that’s Evolution Stupid.
anyway that was a formative memory for me.
Aethelred the Unready
Could be worse. In middle school the teacher asked everyone in class who believe in evolution to raise their hands, I was the only one who did.
Leorale
Were Willis and Joyce allowed to watch this?
https://youtu.be/–szrOHtR6U
ADD
I knew what that video was going to be before I clicked it!
The Flower Cosmic
Dang it, not all monkeys have tails! Barbary macaques are tailless.
The separation of simians into “monkeys” and “apes, which are descended from monkeys and much more closely related to Old World monkeys than any Old World monkey is to any New World monkey” is one of my biggest scientific pet peeves.
The last common ancestor of all apes was a monkey. Cladistically speaking – which is the only way of speaking that makes sense for this sort of thing – all apes ARE monkeys. It’s only arrogance that makes us want to say otherwise.
Humans are monkeys.
George W Harris
Humans are lobe-finned fish!
Librain
Don’t be silly, fish don’t exist!
The Flower Cosmic
I do so love “There’s No Such Thing As A Fish”.
Delavan
Joyce will clearly turn out to be Saiyan.
Paradox
I think its a nested hierarchy thing
All apes are monkeys but not all monkeys are apes
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Reject religion. Become monke
JediMB
monkefication achieved
Needfuldoer
Dina strolls by as her dino-of-the-day, they accidentally recreate a Godzilla vs Kong ‘monke’ meme.
Doctor_Who
Joe requests an extension on the assignment because his partner is suddenly scarfing bananas and looking into whether she would be allowed to install a tire swing in her room.
Professor Brock grants it, because this isn’t his first rodeo and he actually considers the semester a disappointment if this doesn’t happen to at least a few students.
GLaDOS
I was hoping that “this” would be the Reverend Ernest Matthews after he ate the banana.
K^2
“We’re going to need an extension. My partner is facing an existential horror for the first time in her life. Yes, first time. It was hard for me to believe that as well.”
Jade
Huh, you know, this does make me feel bad for people raised creationist.
Jon
The realization is NOT fun. Especially because it comes with severing and rejecting all of the guidance you once relied on, and at times it feels like you can’t turn to anyone in your new, “enlightened” circles because they will have nothing but scorn for the idiot fundie who believed this crap for so long.
Joe’s not responsible for talking Joyce through this, but she very obviously needs SOMEONE to. It’s not something you untangle for 5 minutes before a homework project.
RassilonTDavros
The role of Monkey Master will now be played by Joyce Brown.
RassilonTDavros
(Only in the Canadian dub, though. Everyone else gets Kelsey Grammer.)
Opus the Poet
I thought it was the guy that voiced KITT who did MM… The blooper reel was hysterical when the scripts for Knight Rider were read over MM dialogue.
NotThatDrew
I dunno about Joe, but I’m both amused and impressed by this progress
Doctor_Who
I’m not sure which stage of grief “I’M JUST A MONKEY!” is, could be anger, could be acceptance, but either way she’s going through them pretty quickly.
NotThatDrew
Also, I feel compelled to point out that what appears to be an eyelid in panels 3 and 4 kinda makes it look like Joe temporarily has two sets of eyebrows
Thag Simmons
Not quite as funny a title as ‘the Euphoria is in my pants’ but probably a more appropriate one
Nono
As someone who works with monkeys, gotta say, some days we’re worse than monkeys.
Emperor Norton II
Though not as bad as chimpanzees.
They are the motherfucking worst.
Demoted Oblivious
Child abuse, proxy wars, regular wars, land mines, making suicide bombers, letting others starve so one person can have a fancy (car/pool/fingernails).
And yes, we also still fling poo and beat each other to death with our fists.
Jon
True, chimps don’t build explosives or have cars or pools.
Other than that, though, they’re on the list too. Relatives – whatcha gonna do?
Demoted Oblivious
Oh I don’t dispute that they’re on the list. Cannibalism, battles (maybe wars), murder, and I would guess rape? But to my knowledge at least, they’ve not managed to do anything worse than us. Even if they annihilated a few species, they don’t have us beat for the worst.
Falcon
I don’t understand why people seem to think chimpanzees wouldn’t do many of these same things if they had the same mental and physical tools to build a civilization and technologically progress. We created wheelchairs and bandages, medicine and lightbulbs. We harnessed fire and wind and the sun itself. This same capacity is also what enabled us to commit genocides and crusades and all sorts of horrible stuff. If another species got to where we are, there’d be variations based on natural instincts and whatnot, but they’d likely have their own virtues and evils on a similar scale.
thejeff
Bonobos are pretty cool though.
Reltzik
Technically, some days we’re worse than the OTHER monkeys. Every troop has its problem members.
Mr. Random
Genetically speaking, we’re a monkey’s cousin.
Josh Spicer
Wouldn’t that make males a monkey’s uncle?
AlexanderHammil
Is YOUR uncle also your brother?
Clif
Am I my brother’s monkey?
The question is frequently mistranslated .
Tan
I am your monkey’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate
I am Nothing
Ooh! Ooh! EEK EEK EEK EEK EEK!
EvilMidnightLurker
What does that make us?
King Daniel
Absolutely bananas
I am Nothing
Monkey alone weak…
…Monkeys together strong.
Ryek Hvek
Monkeys need bath
Plain Marie
Ha!!! I literally laughed. Well done!
Demoted Oblivious
[Warning: Possibly Racially Insensitive]
Actually, given the history of racist comparisons utilizing the word “monkey”, does the phrase, “well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” have a racist etymology? I mean, it’s typically somewhat speciesist at the least, but was/is it racist?
Please accept my apologies for any slight embedded in this. Causing hurt is not my intention.
Warren
Some cursory research indicates that no one really knows where the idiom comes from. A few different places (including Wikipedia) claim it started among early twentieth-century creationists mocking evolution, but they don’t have much in the way of citations.
This article cites a newspaper article that uses the phrase “monkey’s uncle” about 12 years before Darwin’s work, and the meaning of the phrase seems to match the modern meaning. Of course, as the article points out, evolution was still a major scientific hypothesis before Darwin figured out its methods, so the phrase could still be a reference to it (or the 1847 article could be etymologically unrelated; it’s entirely possible for two different people to independently decide that having simians in one’s family tree is amusing).
Long story short, I can’t find any evidence to suggest that “monkey’s uncle” came from xenophobic fears about interracial relationships or anything of that nature.
Demoted Oblivious
That’s cool! Thank you for your scholarly efforts.
Wagstaff
Actually we’re Great Apes. Common mistake though. Anyone could have made it.
King Daniel
Monkeys are a paraphyletic group anyway, and common vernacular calls apes “monkeys” often enough that it could be taken as an informal term, if you’re not bothered by being overly accurate.
On the other hand, Monkey Master would probably stomp you if you kept calling him a monkey and not an ape.
Wagstaff