It's so telling that it's been a long established chanlord policy that "anything goes" on /b/ except furry art. Gore and snuff are fine, but that? Outrageous! wojak-nooo

  • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    But I cannot accept the Snake of the Lake having hands. Snakes very intentionally got rid of their hands in evolutionary time and it just feels like it’s breaking a rule

    there are legless lizards like the slow worm

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
      ·
      9 months ago

      Yes indeed, but they are rare and I’m just saying that we should embrace them for their choices.

      Well, that might be a bit much, especially for the venomous ones. We should respect their choices, and it’s obviously worked out for them.

      I do love the boa constrictors with the occasional random tow, though. It’s like a Hemingway cat, but for snakes.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        9 months ago

        It's not really a choice it was a genetic mutation. Also snakes do have a gene to grow legs it just grows penises instead so if it is a choice it is a weird one

        • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
          ·
          9 months ago

          We frequently use words like “choice” to speak about things like evolutionary dynamics because they make the talk more interesting. It’s a deliberate misuse of the phrase in some ways, but it implies that natural selection ended up canalizing snakes into a specific evolutionary pathway - one instead of many possible others - based on innumerable factors but all being by definition locally (in time and place) more or less favorable.

          I appreciate the input and thank you for the clarification for readers - although I don’t imagine many people thought there was some Ur-snake who said “fuck these legs.”

          For the record, I am an evolutionary biologist.

          • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
            ·
            9 months ago

            I don’t imagine many people thought there was some Ur-snake who said “fuck these legs.”

            quite literally they grow penises in their place which was the weirdest fact I learned today