It is classified. Thus saith most encyclopaedias, including the omnipresent, omniscient Wikipedia.
It al began with a guy named Carl Linnaeus. Actually it began a long time before him, but for now, let’s start in Sweden.
Carl Linnaeus lived in Sweden in the eighteenth century. He developed a system for classification – for the whole realm of nature. Most of us have used words like family, class, order, and kingdom. Some of us have sometimes used words like species and genus. Not many of us are still able to recall from our biology school days the package deal of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom. Carl Linnaeus’ used this package as sifts to develop the mother of classification systems in the modern era. Things in nature belong to a species, belong to a bigger genus, belong to a bigger family, belong to a bigger order, and so on - all the way up to being part of the kingdom. Through Linnaeus package of sifts we have just five kingdoms at the top: animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and protoctists. It is a pretty straightforward pyramid system that helped many to classify effectively. Let us call all the people who used his system the Linnaeunites.
People lived in basic harmony and peace with Linnaeunites, but gradually a new group formed that became unsatisfied. They are called by many names. The name that will be used here is Darwinites. Their founder’s well known book, Origin of Species, was already published in 1859. For a hundred years they grew and got stronger and then could not keep silent any more. Since the middle of the twentieth century Darwinites began to ask whether the theory of evolution should not impact the way people classify.
The Cladites and the Pheneticites
It was particularly two sub-tribes that really started the war. They were called the Cladites and the Pheneticites (more appreciated in some circles by their names Cladists and Pheniticists). They were two rival groups that emerged in the 1970’s. The Cladites were convinced evolutionary history is indispensable for classification – good taxonomy they called it. But the Pheneticites challenged that. They thought classification can and should be totally independent of evolutionary considerations. As could be expected, after a while a third group - E-taxonomites (evolutionary taxonomists) - arose who thought that a midway approach was the way out of the quarrel.
The bone of contention in one of their biggest quarrels – in some circles called the monkey trials - was the following: how do we classify biologically upstream from the human species. The usual classification nowadays says humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans and gibbons are all members of the Homonoid superfamily. Baboons, however, are not counted as Homonoids. Why?
