Interesting Little Boozer or Annoying the Intelligent Designers

July 31, 2008 at 6:28 am | Posted in Beliefs, creationism, evolution, god, I'm just saying, intelligent design, science, strange news | 4 Comments
Tags: alcohol consumption, beer, drinking, pen tailed tree shrew, shrew

A tiny Malaysian mammal known as the pen tailed tree shrew can booze it up with the best of them and still pass a field sobriety test (if they field tested tiny Malaysian mammals). These funny looking little creatures (pic below) spend about two hours every night drinking fermented nectar, from the flowers of the bertam palm, which has a 3.8% alcohol content similar to that of many beers, and consume amounts that would be dangerous for most mammals.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with annoying the ID crowd who always posit something really profound like, “OH YEAH! Well if we evolved from apes/monkeys how come there are still apes/monkeys?” Then if you really want too have some fun with fundies you explain that we did not evolve from apes but that we (and apes) evolved from a common ancestor and that ancestor is believed to be a tree shrew. That said, the fundie will be sure you are completely nuts and have now proved his/her case for creation or intelligent design.

Because the species is considered similar to the ancient ancestors of all primates, its 55-million-year bender suggests that our own taste for alcohol might predate the known advent of brewing some 9,000 years ago.

“The circumstances in which these tree shrews consume alcohol could be similar to past scenarios of human evolution in pre-primate or early primate stages [and] could somehow be a link to human alcohol consumption,” said study lead author Frank Wiens, a biologist at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

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Not only did we evolve from tiny rodent like critters, it appears we got our drinking habits from them as well.

I’m just saying.

Pen Tailed Tree Shrew