What is a human? A miserable little pile of clades

8 hours ago

Cladistics is the dominant method for classifying life, based on shared ancestry and all descendants.
Humans belong to multiple nested clades, such as hominins (bipedal, large-brained), apes, primates, and mammals.
Key clades include eukaryotes (organisms with a cell nucleus), animals (multicellular, motile), and vertebrates (with a spinal column).
The classification system illustrates evolutionary relationships, extending from specific groups like hominins to broad categories like life itself.
Cladistics represents a recent paradigm shift in biology, influenced by advances in genetic sequencing since the 1990s.
Each clade has distinctive features and includes organisms not found in more specific clades, such as plants in diphods or fungi in opisthokonts.

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