Over at Evolutionary Genealogy, Leonard Eisenberg has been thinking about how we're related to other animals. Not so much in the evolutionary sense, but in the familial sense. After all, if your cousin is simply the offspring of your parent's sibling, why not continue that logic back a few hundred millennia or so?
To make a rough estimate of the cousin and removal relationship between you and any other living thing, all one needs to do is count up the generations back to the common ancestor. This sounds easy in theory but is complicated in practice. First, make an estimate of the number of generations along the human line back to the common ancestor. Second, calculate the number of generations along the non-human branch back in time to a common ancestor with humans.
Evolutionary biologists and other nerds can argue the details of Eisenberg's number crunching here, as he's mindful of the flaws and has posted his raw data to encourage discussion. But if you just want to find out who should be invited to your mega-family reunion, take a look at the chart below!
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This analysis needs explanations of exactly what 'cousin' and 'removed' mean.
From the numbers, I'm guessing that the level of cousinship might be the number of generations shared by both branches, and the degree of removal the number of excess generations on the branch with more generations.
From the OP:
Why thank you, I've been wondering about gibbons for a while now. They seem to have disappeared from almost all posts on primate evolution for some time.
I mean, they may not be great but they're still apes.
I've never been comfortable with gibbons. I am perfectly willing to extend suffrage to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (being demonstrably more intelligent than many of our electorate), but gibbons?
What's wrong with gibbons? Any ape sensible enough to keep its testicles inside its body gets a vote from me.
@Frank: Thanks! I seem to have lost the ability to read carefully.
This could be a useful comparison to answer the creationist argument that your grandmother doesn't look like a monkey, but then they also could argue about the millions of years bit.
Have linked to this - many thanks! Will be useful in lessons. And as far as the creationists bit... I think Bill Hicks got it right when he asked if anyone else had noticed how all creationists looked curiously unevolved?
What is the actual relationship between the walking styles of chimpanzees and humans? It can't be as simple as the sketch by Darwin, because his intermediates are not walkable positions.
Why is his sketch used as a logo of evolution? For that matter, why does a scientific theory have a logo at all?
@ Colin
Are you referring to ""? If so, it's not by Darwin, and it wasn't meant to illustrate walking styles or a linear progression of evolution!
That's my point. Pictures associated with science are supposed to be meaningful illustrations, and this isn't. It's a logo, and logos are supposed to be for religions. This logo, and also the fish-with-legs logo, do nothing but reinforce the Intelligent Design mentality.