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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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...and now for something completely different: Lemurs and the True Human Form,

in which a Zizian uncovers the biological basis of furrydom, which actually everyone has and is in denial about.

The bodies people walk around in here on Ancient Earth do not necessarily match the sensorimotor portions of their brains, and/or other information content about what their bodies are supposed to be like.

From what I can tell by looking at stuff from the fossil record, other modern species, and my own ancestral memory, it seems that a large part of the True Human Form evolved between 30mya and 85mya, around the time of our common ancestors with lemurs.

Most of our proprioceptive body map probably was selected on during this period of time because the delta to our ancestors’ survival was strongly tied to them using their bodies very precisely and acrobatically.

An anthropomorphic mammal seems like a valid way of trying to project the human self-concept including sensorimotor body map, visual modules, and social modules into a 3D form.

I actually find this somewhat plausible. While a good bit of the bodymap is propably learned as well, we should expect remnants like this. The culturewar-relevant part is how moral conclusions are drawn from it - that this is what youre supposed to be like, your True Form. The analogy between gender and species transition is hardly new, but it always gives a bit of a distorted impression, the latter is always a bit of a cardboard figure. Here, we have someone filling in part of the discourse a transspecies movement that laid similar claim to seriousness as transgenderism would produce.

Lemurs come from a sister family to the group that includes humans. Which is to say, we not that closely related, about as close as cats are to dogs if I'm looking at the right numbers. It doesn't kill the argument, there are snouted primates and tree-jumping primates which are much closer to humans, but it does make lemurs specifically a poor supporting example for the argument.

Our closest common ancestors did look vaguely lemur-like apparently, but it also was quite a long time ago.