If you reply “well, humans aren’t really descended from monkeys, they’re descended from _”, you’re just being pedantic. To an average person, being descended from “apes” or “non-human apes” or “non-human monkeys”, or “monkey-like creatures not exactly like any existing monkey”, or any other “correction” will have pretty much the same connotations as and be objectionable in exactly the same way as and to exactly the same extent as, being descended from monkeys.
It’s like someone complaining that all the computers in his house were stolen, and replying “well, in fact, your microwave oven contains a computer, so it’s not really true that all the computers in your house were stolen”.
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.
Whatever.
If you reply “well, humans aren’t really descended from monkeys, they’re descended from _”, you’re just being pedantic. To an average person, being descended from “apes” or “non-human apes” or “non-human monkeys”, or “monkey-like creatures not exactly like any existing monkey”, or any other “correction” will have pretty much the same connotations as and be objectionable in exactly the same way as and to exactly the same extent as, being descended from monkeys.
It’s like someone complaining that all the computers in his house were stolen, and replying “well, in fact, your microwave oven contains a computer, so it’s not really true that all the computers in your house were stolen”.
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.)