Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 November 16

= November 16 =

Industries
Do industries overlap? I.e. can someone say they work in 2 or more industries in 1 job? For example, could someone working in a construction company building airports say they work in both the construction industry and the airports industry? Or could someone providing telecoms services for a bank say they work in both the telecoms and banking industries? 90.192.104.194 (talk) 01:45, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * They can "say" whatever they want, but that don't necessarily make it so. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:50, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * So is there a correct definitive answer to the question of whether industries overlap? 90.192.104.194 (talk) 02:21, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * In your examples, I'm not seeing it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:52, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Construction and airport, no. Airport operations seems to be very removed from airport construction. But telecom and banking I can see - there are many areas where you need both banking and telecom knowledge to make things work (i.e. you need to take into account FCC rules when implementing a trading application). Industries don't form neat, clean taxonomies to begin with - the boundary between e.g. joiners and carpenters is quite fuzzy. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:12, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * It got even more complex with the rise of Human resource management. Like normal workers are sometimes "shared" between multiple companies thru Temporary work-agencies, it has become a business to "share" Engineers and alike highly specialized professionals. --Kharon (talk) 14:14, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes but theee will be an airport construction department within the airport authority, who will act as the client for the construction project. Would the engineers and project managers there be considered as construction industry professionals or airports industry?  Same with highways and rail. Owning authorities will all have a construction department. 90.192.104.194 (talk) 20:06, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Is there even such a thing as "airport industry"? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:35, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * You can call it what you want but the "overlapping" is more commonly called Synergy in the business-language. Its probably uncommon to refer to both or more industries. Instead it is then usually simply called Supplier or Service for industries, in general for single or multiple industries or businesses. --Kharon (talk) 21:26, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Since you're in the UK, I'd like to refer you to United Kingdom Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities, which classifies companies by industry. Please note that "One or more SIC codes can be attributed to a business", so it's more of a categorisation scheme (where an unlimited number of assignments can be given to an entity) than a classification (where an entity is put in exactly one place). Nyttend (talk) 01:46, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Question about existence of my first relative
I'm curious about my first ancestor. The first person to be related to me. How can I find out when this person first came into existence? Yellow Sunstreaker (talk) 06:47, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * That would be this guy: Y-chromosomal Adam. The "when" is not exactly known. 196.213.35.146 (talk) 07:16, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * There is a big difference between the first common ancestor of today's humans who lived a couple hundred thousand years ago, and the "first" ancestor, which would be some single celled bacteria-like organism several billion years ago. Cullen328  Let's discuss it  07:41, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * And the Y-chromosomal Adam is neither of these two. He is a common ancestor, and the most recent patrilinear ancestor (i.e. father or grandfather or grand-grandfather, or (grand-)*grandfather to any living human). The most recent common ancestor was a lot later. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:51, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * There's also the Chimpanzee-human last common ancestor, but Yellow_Sunstreaker's question (in the way that it was asked) doesn't have a definite answer. AnonMoos (talk) 08:54, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * That single celled bacteria-like organism preferred to be called "Steve". Seriously, the nature of speciation means there is no "first" human. - Nunh-huh 07:45, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * The more usual scientific name for Steve is the Last universal common ancestor... [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 09:01, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Of course, even with an expansive definition of person, Steve will have an uphill battle to convince most others that it meets the definition. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:20, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * I believe that Nunh-huh's original point was that if you insist on strict demarcations between species designations going back in time, then the logical consequence would be that the first homo sapiens was born to a non-homo sapiens mother and father! AnonMoos (talk) 06:19, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Exactly. There's no black/white demarcation line in developing species. - Nunh-huh 06:34, 19 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Pooh-Bah claimed he could trace his ancestry back to "a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:17, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Possibly note-worthy is the fact that none of us have a single ancestor. We each have two, a mother and a father, then four, then eight, and so on. Quite soon we have more ancestors than the total population of the globe. I've never seen this adequately explained. PiCo (talk) 11:00, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * The lines of descent link up.  That's how everyone in Europe is descended from Charlemagne. 82.13.208.70 (talk) 11:05, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * See also pedigree collapse. Adam Bishop (talk) 11:35, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, and you don't have to go much farther back than PiCo says. If one of a pair of grandparents were cousins, then there would still be eight great-grandparents, but only fourteen great-great-grandparents, not sixteen. And on it goes. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:16, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Even when you get back to some common ancestor you would also be descended from lots of other humans who lived at the same time, or even apes as can be seen for instance by that people have different blood groups descended from ones that apes have. Dmcq (talk) 12:17, 16 November 2017 (UTC)


 * I think your first biological ancestor is a one-celled organism somewhere in the middle of the ocean whose own existence as an individual is so trivial that it does not really matter. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 18:52, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * If it's the granddaddy of all of us, then it would matter. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:10, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * If it were actually possible to trace one's lineage back that far, it would not be one single one-celled organism but billions of them. It'd be crazy to single out one of them and say this is "the" original ancestor.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:26, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Tell that to Pooh-Bah. :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:36, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Jack, I don't believe that's true.
 * If you could trace your ancestry all the way back to Abiogenesis, I'm pretty sure you'd find a single individual. What mechanism are you imagining that would allow "billions" of separately evolved cells to come together into a single, single-celled species? (After all, if those "billions" of cells were the same species, you'd be looking for their single common ancestor.)ApLundell (talk) 23:48, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
 * You may have a point.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  01:55, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Or not. The first molecule of silver nitrate that precipitates out of solution isn't in any way the ancestor of subsequent molecules. If the conditions are right for abiogenesis, you have to at least entertain the possibility that more than one instance of it is occuring. - Nunh-huh 02:52, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Is the chance of an instance of abiogenesis being left or right handed amino acids about 50-50? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:27, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
 * I would guess that that would depend on the chirality of the substrates, and their relative abundance :) - Nunh-huh 05:58, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
 * See Chirality (chemistry) which mentions this question. In short, we don't have an answer (yet). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.0.37.45 (talk) 02:31, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Nunh-huh, I can't believe that ambiogenesis happened more than once, but only one of the individuals that emerged could be our direct-line ancestor. What mechanism are you imagining that would allow asexual organisms to have a family tree with more than one beginning?
 * (Your analogy with precipitates doesn't make sense to me. We're not looking for the first cell to emerge from the goo, we're looking for the particular cell, first or not, that is mankind's ancestor.) ApLundell (talk) 02:27, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
 * The point is if it's happening in one place at one time suitable for abiogenesis, it's probably happening to a lot of molecules/whatever, not just in one single instance.- Nunh-huh 06:34, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
 * But that's not the question. It's not a question about all the different cells that emerged from the soup.
 * It's a question about the earliest ancestor, which by definition has to be a single life-form. All the cells that are not our ancestor are irrelevant to the question.
 * So sure, our original ancestor might not have been alone, but there was a point in pre-history where there existed only one ancestor of man. (And, yes, possibly a bunch of other recently-emerged life-forms that would not eventually evolve into mammals and are therefore not the answer to this question.)ApLundell (talk) 02:02, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
 * ApLundell (talk) 02:02, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Cells can exchange genetic material. And before there were cells, there were molecules. - Nunh-huh 03:09, 22 November 2017 (UTC)


 * The entire premise is rotten; we have no proof the OP's first relative was not a lifelong virgin. μηδείς (talk) 17:40, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Besides, did any of them go through a legitimate form of marriage? If not, all their progeny are bastards (= societally sub-human), down to the 100 millionth generation, including us.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:16, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
 * The first mammal has just been identified. 92.8.223.3 (talk) 17:23, 20 November 2017 (UTC)


 * This animal is poorly described in the popular press, it is a contender for the claim of earliest Eutherian, which includes placentals, but not marsupials or monotremes. The headlines are either inaccurate or vague with the qualifier "that led to us". μηδείς (talk) 21:40, 23 November 2017 (UTC)