On 2001.10.12 at 10:44, 9300514_at_ucol.ac.nz (Brendon Lieschke) wrote:
> The only thing that I can see as having a potential problem is about
> how all the different species of anthros theoretically all seem to
> have evolved at the same time. One species like as in the theory of
> regular human evolution, that's be understandable, but for whatever
> reason that the anthro's did outlast the human equivilants back then,
> the problem lies within having so many different species supposedly
> evolving to roughly the same physically looking anthro state at the
> same time, wheather it happened before or after the humans would have
> died out. It seems that even a major cataclysmic event like say, a
> mass-radiation exposure couldn't produce the same uniform effect over
> so many living things...
>
> My question is what could possibly have caused the similar
> simultaneous changes, breaching the inter-species barrier to be able
> to cause the same general biological effect regardless of each
> species genetic makeup?
Parasites or viruses could pass genes from one to another. This is
well documented in plants and protists. That is, assuming the
characteristics are carried by genes.
That is still a big open question now that the human genome is
mapped and the understanding of structural differences is still not
there. Not to mention that the idea of inherited intelligence is on
very shaky grounds.
Something completely different of a nature that isn't understood
today may have happened.
> Aliens? Some sort of virus? A very few humans like us today back then
> doing genetic experiments which produced the anthro's which survived,
> but those few humans ending up dying out from too little diversity
> left in the gene pool (hence the reason for the experimants to try
> and not die out)? They may sound a bit far fetched or silly, but
> that's all my mind seems to come up with for (un?)rational
> explanations at the moment...
Why irrational or (un)rational? Life is certain to exist in other
parts of the universe and there is evidence for past advanced knowledge
and technology. Widespread astronomical knowledge in the ancient world
alone is a good indication that a great deal of knowledge has been lost
in the not-too-distant past. It could be of extraterrestrial origin but
there's no reason to believe it has to have been. Humans are pretty
smart critters.
Humans actually have very little genetic variation. Some studies
indicated that humans had been through a bottleneck at one time of less
than 30,000 individuals, explaining why humans have so little variations
within the species.
In those stories I mentioned in an earlier posting virtually every
lifeform on Earth gained higher intelligence and linguistic ability
almost simultaneously due to alien intervention. They dumped an
engineered orginism into the biosphere to quickly create footsoldiers
for a war then abandoned most of the organisms as unsuitable for their
purposes and left them to fend for themselves. The aliens themselves
were not human shaped and really didn't care too much about the forms of
their soldiers so long as they could follow orders and handle weapons.
Thusly the anthros in that world aren't especially human looking or
acting. Many had clumsy or impractical manipulative organs.
--
Michael J. Rider, aka Ixbalam http://i.am/ixbalam
"Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
-Goliard
Received on Thu Oct 11 2001 - 20:44:12 CDT