My moniker has its own thread, in fact: here.
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Very nice! They seem like a pleasant race of aliens! Don’t let them near the pool, though! 
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On the topic of intuition’s relationship to science and the question of whether humans evolved from monkeys: Lately I have been toying with the hypothesis that for many people, their intuition of what is or isn’t plausible as evolution is tied to boundaries set by common names rather than anything biological. Not among scientists or folks who have dug more deeply into the topic, but among nonscientists.
One manifestation of this intuition is the common refrain “Yeah, but they’re still just X” where X might be finches or bacteria or monkeys or some other group for which we have a well known name. Even though common names encompass various taxonomic levels, and in some cases cross taxonomic groups, many folks seem to gravitate to them as the natural/intuitive/only conceviable way of grouping organisms.
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I 100% agree. It is called the idol of the marketplace.
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This is correct. This whole conversation reminds me of, “What, if anything, is a fish?” Gould’s essay, “What, if anything, is a zebra?” covers this beautifully.
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I’ve been making this argument from basic linguistics for many years now—with limited success. I try to explain that many of these “It’s still an X” arguments may sound plausible in English but not in Mandarin, Hebrew, or Russian because the relevant semantic domains vary from language to language. Lexicographic boundaries have limited dependable relationship to taxonomic boundaries.
Intuition is such a fallible guide, yet all of us rely too heavily on it at times.
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