Talk:Prosimian

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[edit] Paraphyletic stuff in Wikipedia

Perhaps I am a cladistics geek, but I have a problem with things I come across in Wikipedia that read like "Prosimians are the most ancestral extant primates; they represent forms that were ancestral to monkeys, apes and humans." In general I find a lot of taxonomy that isn't informed by a phylogenetic approach to encourage misunderstandings of evolution (and biology doesn't make much sense when evolutionary concepts aren't grasped) and frequently introduce teleological thinking in which we have "higher" organisms and supposedly "primitive" ones that in reality are not ancestral to the "higher" taxa. For example, it is not true to say that lorises are ancestral to apes. While it may be true that the common ancestor of both had more in common with a loris because apes and their ancestors accumulated more derived characteristics over the years, the lorises and other prosimians have of course been evolving and radiating ever since too and have derived plenty of characterisics of their own. It's this kind of thinking that has people coming out with erroneous stuff like "humans evolved from chimpanzees" instead of appreciating that both evolved from a common ancestor no longer with us. 79.68.223.68 (talk) 19:07, 13 May 2008 (UTC)