>> ^shinyblurry:

That is really cool..the japanese are masters of innovation..and cute packaging. This would be good if you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and your pet pygmy mouse lemur was hungry..oh and if you found an oasis with a microwave


The sun!

That is really cool..the japanese are masters of innovation..and cute packaging. This would be good if you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and your pet pygmy mouse lemur was hungry..oh and if you found an oasis with a microwave

Nero's Brother, Joey

Thanks for your keen eye/great memory!

In reply to this comment by IronDwarf:
Sorry, dupe: http://videosift.com/video/Slow-Loris-loves-a-nice-tummy-rub-soooo-cute

>> ^kir_mokum:

it's a slow loris, not a lemur. fyi.


Thanks, I clearly don't know my animals!

it's a slow loris, not a lemur. fyi.

@shinyburry
so did god and jesus also reveal themselves to the chipmunks, the beavers, the ostriches, the gnats, the millions of species all over this planet?
did god appear to the fish in fish form? or to the lemurs in lemur form?
or are humans just so special? are we just SO wonderful that a supreme being would construct a planet for us to enjoy?

you do of course realize just how incredibly self-serving that sounds?


dude, i have no doubt you mean well, but seriously man, chill. thinking you have all the answers is arrogant, not humble. a lot of people have had some seriously spiritual experiences, including myself. but i'll be damned if i'm going to be stupid and arrogant enough to slap a name and face on it and proclaim my ascension.

trepidations reed lemur @ 22:00, another highlight

Thanks! This used to be my joy dance at raves.

In reply to this comment by Lann:
*quality

This used to be my run away dance when tanked.

what you first all fail to understand... is that the proposed process of evolution involves gradual changes over many generations. We can agree to that correct?

So none of the so called 'Transitional Fossils' are remotely transitional.

A transitional form would be one going through the process of developing an arm / leg etc. These fossils should be plentiful considering it would take a sheerly ridiculous number of steps before the animals new form was fully developed... In otherwords.. how many generations and how many forms would it take for a arm to form in an animal which has no arms. How many millions of tries would be necessary by random mutation before it was successful.

I'm sure you can imagine the process.. considering the animal has no idea what it is trying for - the first form of an arm would be, I suppose a stump of some type... now considering this stump would serve it no actual purpose (and in the case of fish we have the peculiar situation where it randomly would need to form 4 of these in symetrical spots... all at once? or one at a time?) This stump would be a detriment.. not an improvement - and so would the tremendous number of other steps involved until this form was complete.

The key here being that every aspect of every animal and plant would need to go through this process.. and the vast majority of these changes could not occur in a beneficial manner - natural selection supposedly works because this change is an improvement.

We have no fossils which represent these transitions.. nothing that isn't fully functional. The ground should be littered with millions of these tiny changes.. in the development of eyes / limbs / and every other form. Instead we find animals which are finished products - just like IDA - well designed for their given purpose.. no works in progress.. no half-formed wings. Were these to even be demonstrated the question would still remain... if every species went through these changes for every single aspect of their development.. any fossil bed should be full of intermediates. By intermediates I mean something which is in the process of developing something.. not finished. IDA uses a thumb which we do not have to climb trees.. it is formed and completed.

One other thing to consider is that evolution's proposed mechanism is random mutation combined with natural selection.. it randomly makes changes.. the failures die out. At the heart of it the mechanism is simply random mutation. - so how many tries does a creature have to make before it randomly stumbles upon something which works? I would wager a vast number..

Thus the fossil record has a compound problem.. not only should it show transitional fossils that are in the lineage of the current form.. it should also show the millions and millions of failed attempts.. the millions of random tries toward a new limb of some kind that were rejected by natural selection.

Not only that - but the world around us should show living examples of these failed species.. because natural selection works on the flawed assumption that if something decides to start working on a new limb.. that since the new limb is a decidedly bad evolutionary change, that creature would die out. Not the case... every animal wants to survive.. and just because it has an inferior design in no way suggests they wouldn't still be around.

IDA is a lemur... a very old variety of lemur. - and no, you don't have a thumb on your foot.

I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere, This find has now almost been ruined by the overenthusiastic discoverers. Yes its a beautifully preserved fossil, yes it's plausible that its an early primate, yes, its an important find that helps us understand evolution better.

But this is NOT "the missing link" and its NOT "The link" These are simplistic slogans design to spark the interest of the public, but that ends up being a severe dumbing down of the subject, and in the end just make it easier to misunderstand evolution, and thus give creationists an easier time.

The term "missing link" is not only an irrelevant and outdated term from the time Darwin first discovered evolution by natural selection, but it even refers to a completely different transition, and thus a different era in evolution.

When Charles Darwin wrote "The Descent Of Man" he basically described what he had left out of "Origin": Humans and their role in evolution. Darwin used comparative anatomy and geographic distribution and other things to support the idea that we evolved from ancestors that we share with other apes. The idea was that, some time ago, our ancestors would look much more "ape-like" to us. They'd probably look alot like chimps to us, though, of course they wouldnt BE chimps, but the ancestor of chimps as well as our ancestors.

Earlier ancestors again would look more like monkeys to us, like "Ida", and even earlier ones would look lemur-like and so on.

The point is, that even tho the evidence Darwin had was very good, we hadnt actually found the "half-human" fossils just yet, the kind that might or might not be bi-pedal, that had bigger brains than chimps, but smaller brains than us, the kind that had more hair than us, but less than other apes, and so on, it is this transition, "from ape to man*" that is meant by a "missing link"

Today we have found many of these "missing links" and its obvious to scientists, as it probably was to Darwin as well, that there is no "one missing link" but a scattered mess of our ancestors relatives, that are more often than not cousins of the "human line" in the tree of life.

Ida is one of many "links" but she's much further back in time, she's probably quite closely related to the ancestor of ALL primates, not just humans, and that's in many respects just as exciting as later, hominid (big brain, bipedal, hairless) evolution, some would say even more exciting, but these simplistic terms does not make it more exciting, just dumber.

Some atheists may actually start believing in a higher power once they're half-lemur & half 9V-battery powered, tentacled soup can.

Yay, thanks for the promote!

In reply to this comment by arvana:
I'm looking forward to my first chameleo-lemur.

I'm looking forward to my first chameleo-lemur.

Neither a baboon nor a lemur be.