Nornagest comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Yvain 13 March 2009 01:41AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 31 July 2014 10:32:02PM *  1 point [-]

Sure. Outside of a biology class I wouldn't nitpick someone saying "humans are descended from monkeys"; it might be wrong by the formal definitions of those groups, but it's not wrong in any way that the Muslim woman in the ancestor will care about, and if the last common ancestor of H. sapiens and, say, a spider monkey were alive today it'd probably be called a monkey in English.

(Not my downvote, by the way.)