grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

And speaking of the Evolution Revolution, here they are with their theme song...

Join the Evolution Revolution!

I spent many a Saturday morning watching Lance Link. Well, not a whole morning. But it was one of the highlights.

Believe it or not, this was one of the best kid's shows on Saturday mornings in 1970, believe it or not. Only The Pink Panther, Scooby Doo and Jambo came close. (<--- I researched the time period)

Interesting, Ken. The similarities to Get Smart! were obvious, but until now I had no idea the scripts were actually originally Get Smart! scripts.

Hmm, here's an amazing documentary.

Wait...so...was he a chimp undercover cop, or was he a cop that was secretly a chimp? The name is ambiguous.

But, did people know he was a chimp? Was he leading a double triple life?

I've never said this before. I hate sayin' it. I apologize for what I'm about to say.

...but I'm just sayin' what's on my mind.

I think Shem should seriously consider dropping some acid.

There's like a basic disconnect that happens sometimes. This sort of unspoken understanding at the base of all communication that sometimes slips out of gear. ...and I can't help but wonder if acid might help.

'cause he's so close. So close. But then it slips outta gear.

No. No one should ever tell anyone else to try acid, even once. But...

Oh, and for the record, I don't think a bad guy named "Ali Ass-A-Seen" is just a play on the name "Haile Selassie".

No I didn't realize that. ...but I did know that they apparently signed off on Amorres Perros. ...and however bad it is in the whole spectrum of animal abuse, regardless of what PETA thinks, I think watching an old episode of Lancelot has gotta be better than, say, slaughtering and eating a cow...

I've never slaughtered one, but I did eat part of a cow earlier today.

And besides I do charity work for Beagle rescue so I'm holier than thou.

P.S. I suggest Shem should maybe try acid, and you try to guilt me with the PETA thing?! Don't you have any heart at all?

Oh you prankster, you!

I have really good vision, Shem.

...and I know. I just know.

Did you watch the episode above?

Shucks.

It's hard to get a sense of the show without seeing it but Stevo, as usual, did a really good job of describing it. The chimps you see aren't anybody's chimps, it's like a parallel universe where everyone is a chimp. It's a chimpanze world--people don't exist. ...or chimpanzes are people. ...or something.

They did have a segment called "Chimpies" where... It was like a short segment for chimpanzee-people who might enjoy watching the antics of monkeys. ...like people watching chimps, the chimps seemed to enjoy watching monkeys.

And I was just kidding about the other stuff. You should never... Never. Not once.

Do I understand this correctly? You're saying that watching chimpanzees makes you feel like shooting them?

You want to shoot the monkeys?

No, they creep me out. Really badly. Like, fear for my safety, want a weapon to defend myself creeped-out. I think it goes back to when I was about 6 or 7; I read an account of a chimp that dropped from a tree, grabbed a baby and murdered it, and another one that severely mauled someone who spend months making friends with the tribe. I don't want that anywhere near me.

And in rereading my comment, I didn't express that very clearly.

Well, when two random men get into a nasty argument, they're rather more likely to hit each other than apologetically fondle each other's crotches, so yeah. We just traded the crazy-ass upper-body strength chimps have for true bipedalism and tool-use.

I thought the prevailing analysis was that this was neotenic - that human beings had characteristics more like juvenile apes. Young apes tend to walk upright for short stretches on the ground and have body proportions closer to adult human than adults of their species do.

Well, I'd heard that linked in the hypothesis as well.

Hey, most of the things gorillas have been maligned with over the years are true of chimps; they're legitimately intimidating critters once you get past the Bedtime for Bonzo stuff. "Close to human" ain't the greatest recommendation in the animal kingdom. :)

I'd also heard that human being had neotenic characteristics of juvenile apes -- including a relatively flatter face and relatively larger braincase. That could still be true too. Baby animals are thought to often retain primitive characteristics from earlier forms -- for example, primitive deer may have once had white-spotted coats like fawns do. And the earliest lions might have had rosette-spotted coats like lion cubs do. (This is assuming that biologists/zoologists haven't since decided this is all bullshit; it's hard to keep up. Although I did recently read that DNA evidence suggests that the closest living relatives of lions are [spotted] jaguars. No, not leopards, which [today] live in the same continents where lions do, but jaguars, which today only live in the Americas, although jaguar-like fossils have also been found in the Old World.)

Anyway, the idea that bipedalism rather than knucklewalking is the original/primitive condition for apes is a new hypothesis. But it's not necessarily incompatible with the older neoteny hypothesis.

(I feel like I'm at some kind of zoology conference ... and I like it.)

The folks at Animal Diversity Web* have this to say about the family Hominidae.

*This is a super cool web site.

Well, personally, I think that's false only by virtue of there being no objective importance, and really nothing objective at all besides brute fact patterns. I value humans over redwoods because I value humans over redwoods. There's no reason someone else couldn't make the opposite value judgment.