Writing "Wild" Sex

Three books about animal mating and reproduction recommended as sources of inspiration for writers who invent alien species:

WILD SEX: WAY BEYOND THE BIRDS AND THE BEES (1991), by naturalist Susan Windybank. Each chapter covers a different theme, such as "Group Sex," "Mating Calls," "Promiscuity," "Strange Sex Organs," etc. Except in the chapter devoted solely to birds, the author leaps from species to species in almost a stream-of-consciousness style and spends anywhere from a paragraph to a page or two on each. The reader can discover all sorts of intriguing body structures and behaviors for further exploration elsewhere. The book has a glossary, an index, and a short bibliography. WILD SEX is a fun read if you don't mind the pervasive, often too-cutesy anthropomorphizing of its animal subjects.

At the opposite extreme stands BIOLOGICAL EXUBERANCE: ANIMAL HOMOSEXUALITY AND NATURAL DIVERSITY (1999), by biologist and cognitive scientist Bruce Bagemihl, the most technical of the three. Directed at both academic and non-academic readers, this monumental text (over 700 pages counting footnotes, index, and credits) explores alternative mating activities among a wide range of animals, focusing mainly on birds and mammals. These fascinating analyses of animal behavior are backed up by statistics and careful explanations of the limits of zoological observation. The first half of the book gives an overview of the field, with many specific examples. Bagemihl tackles problems such as defining homosexuality, transvestism, and transsexuality among animals and the hazards of equating these phenomena with human behavior. The second half, "A Wondrous Bestiary," organized by categories (e.g., primates, marine mammals, hoofed mammals, etc.) under the two classes of birds and mammals, devotes about three pages to each creature. Individual bibliographic lists appear at the ends of these reference items. If you want to construct a rigorous scientific and statistical background for the sexual biology of your aliens, consult this work.

DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE TO ALL CREATION (2002), by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson (which I may have mentioned in the past). The most entertaining of the batch, this book is structured as "advice to the lovelorn" replies to letters from various animals and even a few non-animals such as slime molds (which may have about 500 sexes—not that all 500 have to unite to reproduce, but the organism can have that many distinct kinds of gametes). It's divided into three parts, "Let Slip the Whores of War," "The Evolution of Depravity," and "Are Men Necessary?" Dr. Tatiana explores the sex lives of all kinds of creatures from microbes to arthropods to mammals and most classes in between. The answers to the letters are long and detailed, using each creature's question as a springboard to discuss a variety of organisms that use similar strategies. She even explores the most deviant sexual pattern, strict monogamy, and the question of why purely asexual reproduction is so rare. Footnotes and an extensive bibliography provide supporting material to verify the seemingly bizarre facts. In my opinion, this would be the most useful research source for non-specialists seeking a wide—and wild—overview of reproductive biology in all its variations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Accelerating Human Evolution

If you have a chance, pick up the April 2017 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and check out the cover article, "The Next Human." Contrary to popular belief, the human species hasn't stopped evolving. This article mentions several examples of recent evolutionary change, such as the two most widely known: While most ethnic groups lose the ability to digest milk in adulthood, a few have developed adult lactose tolerance, which led to cultures based on dairy herds. The gene for sickle cell anemia causes a serious disease when doubled, but inheriting only one copy of the gene seems to provide resistance against malaria. Adaptations less familiar to the general reader include populations living at high altitudes who have evolved a hemoglobin trait that enables them to use oxygen more efficiently and desert dwellers who can handle a wider range of temperature extremes than most people.

Evolution doesn't have to wait for the slow processes of nature anymore, though. Technologies such as CRISPR can alter genes to order. Few people would object to using genetic engineering to correct disabling or lethal inherited conditions. But what about choosing an embryo's eye and hair color or trying to enhance intelligence in utero?

The article, however, also explores technological advances that adapt users to the environment in ways natural processes alone can't. One man born with achromatopsia—he's literally color-blind, seeing only blacks, whites, and grays—has an antenna attached to a sensor in his brain that enables him to perceive colors. Not only that, he goes beyond ordinary human vision to "see" infrared and ultraviolet. Hundreds of people have been implanted with devices that allow them to unlock doors or log onto computers without touching anything. The University of Southern California is running tests on "chip implants in the brain to recover lost memories."

Does becoming a cyborg count as a form of "evolution"?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Evolution of Civilization

An interesting short article answering this question:

Why Haven't We Found Civilizations Older Than 7000-8000 Years?

The questioner wondered why, if our species evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, it took so long for human cultures to make the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a civilized one.

Here "civilization" means the standard definition of settled city life with classes of people who specialize in various occupations. Several conditions are required for civilization to develop:

Most importantly, agriculture is necessary to produce enough of a food surplus to free some subsets of the population to specialize in other skills and be supported (through trade, patronage, etc.) by the farming class. Agriculture needs at least two preconditions, as outlined in the article—favorable climate and a critical mass of population (for agriculture to have a significant advantage over hunting and gathering; if a society is small enough that it can feed itself by hunting and gathering, there is no incentive to switch to the harder work of farming). Both of those conditions were fulfilled after the last Ice Age gave way to the present "interglacial" period we're living in.

"Civilization" in this sense is probably a prerequisite for advanced technology. To produce the kind of high-tech society we now have, you need people free to work full time in highly specialized fields of research, engineering, and manufacturing. Therefore, an SF author creating a space-faring alien culture has to give the aliens a home world and an evolutionary history that allow for agriculture, settled living, and vocational specialization (even if that worldbuilding never explicitly gets into the story). If the aliens come from a radically different kind of background, how they developed the capacity for space travel probably needs to be explained.

That article links to a Quora page exploring another intriguing question: Why haven't other animals evolved intelligence equal to ours?

Why Didn't Other Animals Develop Intellect Like Apes?

What are the minimum prerequisites for developing intelligence (once you get past the hurdle of defining "intelligence," of course)? As far as we can tell from observing ourselves and other animals with an intellectual edge over their closely related evolutionary counterparts, some of the factors seem to be belonging to a social species, having manipulative organs to interact with the environment, having access to abundant nourishment to support a big brain, and possibly being omnivorous (because having to search for food and determine what's good to eat encourages problem-solving). When constructing a sapient alien species, it's desirable to consider how they evolved to become intelligent, keeping these factors in mind.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Feminist Bonobos

Among bonobos (formerly known as pygmy chimps), older females often protect younger ones against male harassment:

Bonobo

This behavior is especially remarkable because female bonobos, unlike some other species of apes, typically leave home at adolescence and join other groups, so adult females in a bonobo band mostly aren't relatives. Yet they form coalitions with unrelated females. Bonobo society has been described as more matriarchal than that of common chimpanzees; males derive their status from the status of their mothers. Bonobos have a reputation as the "make love, not war" apes because their social interactions depend more on sexual overtures than on aggressive dominance displays. They've even been known to make conciliatory sexual gestures toward members of other troops rather than attacking them.

Many behaviors formerly thought to set apart human beings as unique among primates have been observed in chimpanzees, e.g., tool-using, cooperative hunting for meat, and, sadly, rape, murder, and something like war. Bonobos especially demonstrate such features as non-reproductive sex for purposes of affection and bonding, oral sex, the importance of the clitoris in erotic stimulation, same-sex erotic activity, and face-to-face intercourse. The riddle of why human females ceased to have estrus cycles becomes less significant when we learn about non-reproductive intercourse among bonobos. The status of "receptive" to mating vs. "non-receptive" turns out to be a continuum rather than all or nothing.

These apes can shed light on human social evolution. They still, however, leave unresolved the big differences between Homo sapiens and all other primates—habitual bipedalism and the loss of most body hair. We're the only "naked apes." As Elaine Morgan discusses at length in her fascinating books on the "aquatic ape hypothesis," the replacement of fur with fat is unusual only among land animals. I still find her arguments compelling, even if she may have made some errors in detail and if a few of the big problems of human development she tackles in THE DESCENT OF WOMAN (e.g., intra-species aggression, perpetual sexual receptivity) have become less problematic in recent decades.

Jared Diamond, author of GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, also wrote THE THIRD CHIMPANZEE, which explores human evolution on the premise that an alien observer would view chimpanzees, bonobos, and Homo sapiens as three equivalent, closely related species. Diamond speculates on why our variety of "chimpanzee" evolved to become the dominant species on the planet.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mother Nature

That's the title of a 1999 book by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. (No, that's not a typo.) The phrase has at least a double meaning, referring both to maternal instincts and behavior in nature and to the nature of motherhood.

Some animals practice semelparity, putting all their literal eggs in one metaphorical basket by breeding only once in a lifetime. Examples include the salmon who swims upstream to spawn and die or the spider whose newborn young eat her body. More commonly, "higher" animals practice iteroparity (what a cool-sounding word), like us and our primate kin—reproducing multiple times. A female in an iteroparous species has to balance the welfare of the newest infant against her prospects for maximizing the number of offspring who survive over the long term. "Nurturing" is only one trait of the ideal mother in nature; she may also compete against other females for the status and resources that give her children the best chance to thrive or even make hard choices about cutting her losses with one baby for the sake of future babies who will have better prospects for survival.

A culture of sapient aliens in which the dominant female's pheromones suppress ovulation in the other females in the group, as among some social mammals on Earth, would have a very different family structure from ours. Among sapient aliens with biology like that of the above-mentioned spiders, a female who devised a way to survive the birth of her children might be condemned as scandalously immoral.

Female primates during their fertile periods often mate with numerous males so that those males will protect the resulting offspring rather than threatening them. It's not uncommon for males of many social species (lions, for instance) to kill infants sired by other males in order to bring the females into estrus immediately. In some human hunter-forager cultures, people believe a fetus is built up gradually by repeated infusions of semen from multiple acts of intercourse. Women deliberately consort with several men during pregnancy, and everyone who's had sexual relations with her during that time is deemed a father to the baby. Suppose an alien species existed in which this belief reflected biological reality, so that a baby really did have multiple fathers? In their society, polyandry would probably be the norm.

Among the vast majority of primates (including Homo sapiens in most cultures), males take little part in caring for infants. A satirical novel about a women-ruled planet I've read, however, takes the logical position that because women bear the burden of pregnancy and nursing, the father should do all the rest of the work of child-rearing. Men in that society stay home to care for the house and the babies, while after giving birth women don't do much with infants besides breast-feed them.

In hard times, some pregnant animals can re-absorb or spontaneously abort embryos at an early stage. Some species even have the power to alter the sex ratios of their offspring by selectively miscarrying embryos of one sex, according to which sex has the best opportunity for reproductive success depending on the availability of resources in a particular breeding season. Think what an advantage would belong to an intelligent species that could consciously perform this kind of "natural" birth control.

Maximizing the number of surviving offspring to carry her genes doesn't mean a mother necessarily nurtures every infant she bears. In the case of a too-large litter, females of some species may abandon the weakest, maybe even eating them to "recycle" their substance as nourishment for the mother herself and her favored young.

We might find it difficult to accept as "civilized" a planet where mothers have a duty to cull sickly newborns and where eating the culls is considered perfectly reasonable. Or a society that has institutionalized and ritualized the practice of dominant males killing the children of their predecessors, as the mating duel to the death is ritualized in the Vulcan Pon Farr ceremony.

Imagine encountering a species of advanced aliens who practice one or more of these pragmatic "nature red in fang and claw" customs. Think of the Martians in Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, whose culture shocks the human characters for several reasons, not only that the Martians practice ritual cannibalism (among other things) but that they cast their young out into the desert to fend for themselves and prove their worthiness to survive. As Mike, the human "Martian," explains, among his adoptive people competition for fitness happens in infancy and childhood rather than adulthood. (We get a glimpse of this process in the earlier novel RED PLANET, which appears to be set on the same version of Mars.) Another kind of struggle for fitness among children occurs in Suzy McKee Charnas's MOTHERLINES. Upon weaning, children leave their mothers and join the "child pack." They grow up wild, learning to provide for themselves and form rivalries and alliances among their age-mates. Only at adolescence are they reclaimed by their mothers and readmitted to adult society.

Adjusting to intelligent aliens with customs like these might be more shocking to our sensibilities than the three genders and male pregnancies of the TV series ALIEN NATION.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Microbiome Evolution

Recent research about the human microbiome—the ecology of the microorganisms that live in our bodies—indicates that the many species of flora and fauna inhabiting our digestive tracts originated with our prehuman ancestors and evolved in parallel with them:

Primates and Gut Microbes

A genomics researcher in Bethesda, Maryland, suggests that "this mutualistic symbiosis helped the human species evolve." We inherit not only our genes but our internal symbionts.

Another article I read about this discovery mentions that the cumulative mass of microbes in our intestinal tract typically outweighs our brain. It's boggling and humbling to contemplate how much of what we call our own body consists of alien organisms, most of them friendly or harmless.

This topic reminds me of Madeleine L'Engle's A WIND IN THE DOOR (sequel to her classic A WRINKLE IN TIME). Young heroine Meg becomes miniaturized in order to travel inside the body of her gravely ill little brother, Charles Wallace. She meets submicroscopic creatures who live in Charles Wallace's mitochondria. To these beings, a cell is their entire world, and Charles's body is a galaxy. They don't even realize their "galaxy" is sentient until Meg enlightens them. They and she become aware of the vital interconnectedness and inestimable value of all parts of creation, no matter how tiny or vast.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Real-Life "Superpowers"

Here are three lists of real-life extraordinary human anomalies from the "Cracked" website:

DNA Mutations That Make Ordinary People X-Men

Personally, I wouldn't classify genes for adventurousness and happiness as superpowers, simply normal variations. The Argentinians who have a supernormal tolerance for arsenic and the Inuit who process dietary fats differently from the rest of us, though, strike me as bona-fide extraordinary.

A sample of abilities everybody has in infancy but loses as he or she grows up:

5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies

A recurring theme of these infant "powers" is that growth requires pruning and focusing so that some abilities get lost as a necessary part of adjustment to the needs of adult life. For instance, pre-verbal babies can hear and produce all the sounds possible to the human vocal apparatus; when they learn to talk, however, they "forget" how to process the sounds their native language doesn't use. Reminds me of the scene in MARY POPPINS where we're told all babies understand the language of birds, yet as they learn human speech, they lose that gift.

How about a man who can touch live wires with impunity because he has seven to eight times greater resistance to electricity than the average person? Or the autistic savant with perfect visual memory, who can draw a whole city in accurate detail after seeing it once? The man who can control his autonomic body functions so well he can sit almost naked on ice without freezing and the man with reflexes faster than the human eye can follow also fit credibly into the "superpower" category:

6 Real People with Superpowers

If the environment changed radically enough in some distant future era, could one of these traits become so important to survival that it spread widely through the population, making individuals who carried that gene an elite group? In the back story of Tanith Lee's SABELLA, a human-like species evolved a form of gender dimorphism in which women fed on the blood of their mates, so that the population could survive dire, long-term food scarcity. How great a change in the environment would be required to generate alterations in human biology this extreme? Or the tendril-bearing, telepathic mutants of A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN or the Simes and Gens of Jacqueline's far-future Earth?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Human Evolution (Extrapolation)

Any author of alien romance would be fascinated to read Susanna Baird's July 8th article published on AOL. explaining that Tibetans Evolved at Fastest Pace Ever Measured

At least, I assume so. The more science that backs up whatever is convenient for the purposes of telling a great science fiction, the better. That's why I love books such as "The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence Krauss, and "The Science Of Star Wars" by Jeanne Cavelos.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the interesting scientific assertion that genitalia (at least in beetles) evolve much more quickly than other parts. Apparently, it's a matter of what intrigues and pleases the female of the species.

It seems that blood and lungs and genes and DNA evolve in humans. That's a matter of survival in a harsh environment. Of course, we've heard about blood doping, and the suggestion that training at high altitudes can give endurance athletes a competitive advantage.

Aliens from harsher environments than ours could plausibly be considered supermen. If their gravity were heavier (as with my Great Djinn from Tigron) they could leap higher and further. If their air were thinner, they'd seem far more athletic in our rich air.

One has to remember the obverse of this. If these aliens are going to take a human wife home with them, she is going to have problems with their thin air and heavy gravity (as my Djinni-vera does in "Forced Mate".)

Another bit of useful trivia is the effect of weightlessness (space travel) on the human body. For instance, bones lose mass, everywhere except the skull, and some of that unnecessary calcium finds its way to the kidneys where it creates "stones". The Johnson space center in Houston has an astounding display of astronaut kidney stones.

For that reason, gymnasium scenes about spaceships make a lot of sense... and I do have a few of those. Exercise is very important if your alien or human interstellar traveler is going to stay in shape, and reasonably comfortable in the bathroom.

I'll just point out a couple of interesting features of the study of Himalayan Tibetans as reported by Susanna Baird. The Tibetans live almost 3 miles about sea level, but are otherwise closely related to the Han Chinese who live nearby as the crow flies (probably not a crow!) but 3 miles lower.

Time scale. This rapid evolution (of more than 30 genes) is estimated to have taken  "the evolutionarily brief span of 2,750 years."

If one has a premise that ones aliens are forgotten human colonists, they'd have had to have left Earth at least in 750 BC. (Or over 100 generations ago.)

Number of mutated genes necessary for a single functional adaptation.

 

Just as retaining e-book and POD rights requires about 23 changes to a boilerplate publishing contract, "Researchers found more than 30 mutated genes in the Tibetans, most of which were not mutated in the Chinese. More than half the mutated genes related to the body's processing of oxygen."

 

You'd think that one gene would suffice? Apparently, for plausibility, base any evolution on a lot more tiny mutations than that!

Does anyone know what the threshold would be, beyond which interbreeding ought to become impossible? 

 

Since I started writing in 1992, I "solved" that problem to my own satisfaction with the concept of "smart semen"....

Ooops. I just burned breakfast. Gotta go.

Rowena Cherry

Parallelism, Convergence, or something else

For the purposes of alien romance , tonight, I'm thinking about the three --or four-- reasons that romantically inclined aliens might look reasonably like us.

Convergence might be the most "fun". That is where a species evolves to look like another species, often a prey species, for a good and sufficient evolutionary reason. For instance, all the better to prey upon us.

Vampires might be a good example. The book "The Sparrow" had another cool example. Imagine a lion evolving to look a lot more like a wildebeest, so it could get really close to its prey without being noticed.

Parallelism is where different species evolve independently, but end up looking the same. We might like to think that this is because the design is the perfect adaptation.

Intelligent design, or divine intervention. One God --from outer space-- either liked the model so much that He --or She-- duplicated it. Or else, He --or She-- was not entirely satisfied, and created new and improved versions of the basic model.

Seeding... "gods from outer space" who were simply more technologically advanced, for whatever reason --not necessarily moral--, colonized, terraformed, performed cross-breeding experiments, and then went away (or didn't).

Of course, you could also have almost any combination of any of those, as in the case of the race of alien males whose own females have become sterile (or vice-versa) and therefore they abduct us, and as a result, evolve to look even more like us.

Have I missed anything out?

Happy Christmas!

Rowena Cherrry


alien romance

Chess-inspired ("mating") titles. Gods from outer space. Sexy SFR. Poking fun, (pun intended). Shameless word-play.

Disparate things and unfinished business

This image has absolutely nothing to do with Cindy's sagging middle, or Jacqueline's evolutionary preferences... it has to do with mine, perhaps.

Also with unfinished business.

On reading Jacqueline's fascinating blog about world-building, the two books I thought of were H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (I confess... it was not so much the book as the movie with Jeremy Irons as the troglodite-predator branch of homo sapiens) and The Sparrow.

Both books had a predator and a prey species who looked similar. In the case of The Sparrow, it was a matter of convergent evolution. The predator evolved to look like its prey, so that hunting would be less strenuous.

If I'm going to have a predator and prey species in my books, I'd like the predatory males to be attractive, and to have a limited interest in eating prey females.

I can say that. In both The Sparrow and the Jeremy Irons movie, a predator wanted to have intercourse with a female member of the prey species. Now, the female prey wasn't keen on the idea, in one case because it was dangerous... like a deer going to bed with a lion, in the other, because Jeremy looked and acted a bit like an Uruk-Hai.

Now, the Uruk-Hai were buff and ripped, a bit too ripped in some cases, really, but they had terrible dentition and I'm sure their breath was unimaginably bad.

The problem with all this for mainstream literature is human taboos. If we were lion-men, as a society we'd probably imprison any lion-man who indulged his attraction to a deer-lady.

Our culture has fewer issues when the predator is, or claims to be, a god. At least when I was a schoolgirl, we studied Greek and Roman literature in school. We didn't bat an eyelid when a honking great male swan (who was the king of all gods in disguise) gave Leda a couple of double-yolked eggs. Or when he turned a girlfriend into a cow so he could continue the affaire without upsetting his wife.

OK. His wife was upset anyway.

Zeus's other disguises included being a bull (now that is scary, and impractical, you'd think) and a golden shower (!).

For the last fifteen or so years, I've chosen to write alien romances about "gods from outer space" which allows me to cherry-pick items from our culture that I'd like to claim the gods gave us... like chess and fortune-telling. It's rather like the point Margaret made about our language stealing choice words from other nationalities, only --perhaps-- in reverse.

As for the picture, it's concept art from a work in progress and I put it up here simply for a bit of visual interest. I've gone back to Ed Traxler who created my Insufficient Mating Material slideshow to produce a slide show for the e-book Mating Net (a short story).

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry
rowenacherry.com

Evolutionary Tree and Worldbuilding

Folks:

Those who've read Linnea Sinclair's post for March 19, 2007, just previous to this one, will be particularly interested in the sentence in the article I'm discussing here that indicates humans evolved from prey not preditors. And prey do tend to form groups, herds, flocks, prides, etc. I can wonder if it's too simplistic to classify humans as preditor or prey when we clearly produce both.

An Item in the March 18, 2007 issue of Newsweek -- BEYOND STONES & BONES: The New Science of Evolution by Sharon Begley -- gives us an interesting twist on the biological part of the author's worldbuilding job (we not only have to make planets, but biospheres too).
There are some illustrations in the print article that don't appear in the free online article, but here's the link to the online article.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17542627/site/newsweek/

This model of human evolution opens a whole lot of possibilities for the evolutionary trees of other planets that we can just imagine -- and all the trouble Terran explorers could get into because they didn't understand where the planet was in this process when they landed.

Who's to say that two or three independently evolved versions of some sapiens species might not independently open negotiations with some alien explorers. That's been done in SF, but here we have a way to make it plausible to modern readers who are learning THIS model of human evolution in school (or not!).

What's important about this article is not the science it's explaining -- anyone following "the literature" would know all this already years ago. What's important about this article FOR WRITERS is that it's in Newsweek -- and thus now writers who are worldbuilding must assume their readers are familiar with this new theory of the evolutionary pattern.

Some may rely on it as the best current information, some my disbelieve it because they disbelieve, and others may misunderstand it. But now it's in Newsweek, the SF/F writer has to account for it in order to make the story plausible to the most readers.

Some of the items of greatest interest to me come near the end of the article.

a) (bottom of page 1 of online article) the record shows evolutionary changes seem to come in bursts, in fits and starts.

More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species' travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when "nothing much happened," punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum's new hall.

b) (4th parag up from the end )

"We are all descended from maybe about 2,000 men -- perhaps 4,000 people. And I recall they genetically identified "Eve" the one woman who is ancestor to all modern humans. I don't know if that's still firmly established. "

c) (2nd parag up from the end) the most recent change in the human genome seems to have occurred 5800 years ago --

"The third (...gene...), called ASPM and also involved in brain size, clocks in at 5,800 years. That was just before people established the first cities in the Near East and is well after Homo sapiens attained their modern form. It therefore suggests that we are still evolving."

d) ( at the end of page 2 online) connect this to item a) above.

"Instead, evolution played Mr. Potato Head, putting different combinations of features on ancient hominids then letting them vanish until a later species evolved them. "Similar traits evolved more than once, which means you can't use them as gold-plated evidence that one fossil is descended from another or that having an advanced trait means a fossil was a direct ancestor of modern humans," says Wood. "Lots of branches in the human family tree don't make it to the surface.""

DISCUSSION:

a) as I originally set up the Sime~Gen mutation, channels appeared and disappeared quite a few times leaving no record (lots of great stories in times of chaos) -- and likewise the Farris mutation occurred independently in widely separated places, mostly only to fail because they are so fragile. Fan writers have largely ignored all those story opportunities! That may be because they were operating from the "old model" of human evolution mentioned in this Newsweek article while I had extrapolated ahead to the currently fashionable model explained here.

b) has little to do with S~G -- but in worldbuilding in general, that 2,000 male group of ancestors might be the crew and passengers of a crashed space ship. Given this model of evolution -- where modern traits appear and go extinct over and over at widely separated and disconnected places -- it's possible to extrapolate that just exactly that kind of "appear/disappear" evolution is going on on other planets, and somewhere OUR traits would appear and not disappear too quickly.

On the other hand "we" haven't been around very long -- who says we aren't going to disappear in this Global Warming phase, only to reappear again independently here when the climate is better, or on another planet. Of course, Global Warming could be terminated by a meteor strike or Supervolcano eruption.

Look at this "appear/disappear" model from a far perspective. Isn't it as if "something" is trying to use the anthropoid DNA template to "emerge" ??? hooo-hooo spookey.

c) You all do know this is the year 5767 of the Hebrew calendar -- that means that God finished creating humankind 5, 767 years ago, just when this calculation shows that the latest gene was added to our makeup, the key turning point in the record where language, art and culture emerge. (as I recall agriculture appeared about 7,000 years ago, and as much as 9,000 years ago some kind of human traveled from what is England today, across Greenland to the Eastern Canada and US shores (they left graves with peculiar red clay in them).

d) put the "fits and starts" concept of evolutionary progress together with the way a pattern seems to emerge here, there, elsewhere, die out, and emerge again independently -- correlate that with the mystical view of the universe and you can worldbuild for the next 30 years and not run out of permutations and combinations of worlds in which to tell stories.

Also don't fail to notice how the "fits and starts" concept of evolutionary progress doesn't exactly fit with the "genetic clock" calculations where genetic replication "mistakes" are made at a statistically predictable rate.

Now I do expect that in a few years, this entire model of evolution will hit the trash can as researchers dig up the connecting links among the dead ends -- but in the meantime, we can have a FIELD-DAY in SF writing.

And what haunts me in the whole thing is how obvious it is that WE (us Ancients) are likely to be one of those branches that peters out to extinction. Where have I seen that theory played with in SF?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/