On the origin of species (interplanetary edition)

[pfors]

I guess this must have been discussed before, but since I can't find the topic I'll start a new one to satisfy my curiosity. The subject is of course the similarity between the human and faey species (or subspecies), in particular the genetic similarity, and the origin thereof.
I don't know if it was ever given much space in the books except for some hand waving arguments about convergence (the phenomenon of creatures having similar lifestyles and habitats evolving similar physical characteristics), but if so I seem to have missed it. The problem with that approach is of course that natural selection (and convergence) acts on phenotypes, not genotypes. It can be brought in to explain why the species look alike (to a certain extent at least), but not the genetic match. That two species that evolved separately would be close enough genetically to hybridize is a statistical impossibility, if life arose separately on Earth and Draconis it's even highly unlikely that they would share the same kind of genetic code.
This leads to the conclusion that there must have been some prehistoric contact between the two planets, likely no more than a few hundred thousand years ago, or hybridization wouldn't be possible, but no less than several tens of thousands of years to give the species some time to diverge. Since the evidence that humans evolved on Earth is extremely strong, it would seem likely that the contact was in the form of a group of humans somehow transported to Draconis.
A problem with this hypothesis is that a faey biologist would be hard pressed not to notice it. If your species is radically different from all the life forms surrounding you and you can find no evidence for it in the fossil record, you have to wonder if you didn't come from somewhere else. If then you find a whole planet where all life is similar to yourself and there is a rich fossil record which proves that it evolved there, the obvious conclusion is that you've found the origin of your species. Now, since nothing like that has been mentioned (and it'd be a pretty big deal) we can assume that most, if not all, life on Draconis is similar to that on Earth and that Draconis has its own fossils to show that life evolved there. The only way I can scrape off the top of my mind to solve such a problem is to postulate several and rather frequent (say every couple million years or so) exchanges of life forms, in either one or both directions, between the planets during at least several hundred million years.

[Weresmilodon]

First off, sorry, I read most, but not all of your post. I'm a bit tired and have trouble focusing right now.

Secondly, the connection between Faey and Humans has been discussed before, and Fel has verified that there is indeed a connection. In the for of Faey starting off as telepathic humans, and were then moved to Draconis by another Advanced civilization /whom we have never heard anything from again, or seen any signs of, as far as I know). Faey left among themselves, without any 'lesser' race vulnerable to telepathy turned onto themselves in a struggle for dominance much more potent then just about any we have had here on earth, and this forced them to advance faster technologically. This struggle has been (and still is) going on for so long that it has all but been bred into them. (Leading to all the conflict within their civilization we see in the book) And... I've lost my train of thought. What was it I was going to say again?

[boballab]

I found this link to an article that touches on this topic:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm

Now this Dr. Boss comes to the conclusion that there should be thousands of "earth" like planets just in the milky way alone. I guess he used basic statisical formulas to arrive at that conclusion, however with that said his conclusion about life on those planets sounds very egocentric for the human race. I'm not an expert but to me life on Earth like planets that would have been formed around the same time that our own planet was formed should fall out in a bell curve pattern. A few would be very advanced others far behind but the majority should fall in the middle and the way he talks is that the Human species is automatically the furthest ahead and the rest is pond scum.

Just using the earth like planets as a start point if some outside agency took a human life form from earth and planted it on another planet there would be what you see in between Human and Faey DNA. The amount of drift between the two would only be dependent on how many years the two branchs have been seperated in different enviroments. The more time apert the further the DNA will drift apart until they would become no longer compatible.

[pfors]

Actually I think his statement "But I think that most likely the nearby 'Earths' are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." sounds quite right. The vast majority of life on earth is bacteria and in more extreme environments they're usually the only life. Since Earth-like planets would include for example Mars, it's easy to see why one might consider bacterial life to be the most likely. The conditions required for multicellular life simply seem to be much narrower and thus less likely.
It's no stretch to assume that highly intelligent life does not exist on the vast majority of planets supporting life. Of course, considering the number of Earth-like planets cited in that article (100,000,000,000) that tiny fraction with intelligent life forms could still be quite enormous.

[boballab]

If you read to the end of the article you get this litle blurb:

Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.

Also think of what all that went in to how we came about and you should be able to figure out why the statement that life on those planets would be like Earth was 4 billion years ago is ludricous at best.

When life first started on this planet 4 billion years ago the planet was extremely volcanic. As the volcanism died away so did the conditions that allowed those type of microbial life forms to live die with it and prevented evolution to move ahead. Planets do not stay that volcanically active for 4 billion years. Also 4 billion years is more then enough time for evolution to advance lifeforms beyond where they started. Then factor in asteroid, meteor and comet strikes that causes large die offs just like here on earth and you can see that life would not, nay can not stay stagnent for 4 billion years. At different points in time of earths history this planet has been ice covered completely, had vast amounts of impacts from space when the solar system was young, had no land masses it was completely covered with water and had so many volcanoes erupting that very little light reached the planet. All rock like planets are going to change as they age and cool as they get older, and what lets a certain lifeform live when a planet is young and geologically unstable will disappear over time. So the only way that most of those planets life would be like earth of 4 billion years ago is if they were 4 billion years younger then the earth and I doubt that is the case.

Evolution is driven by enviroment and as the enviroment changes the lifeforms change with them or die out. That is until you get to a species that can make artificial enviroments such as Homo Sapiens. An example of this is if a new ice age came along it would be rough on us but it wouldn't wipe us out because we know how to make fire to keep us alive in lower tempatures. A Species such as the Koala or Panda would be almost likely to die out since they are so habitat dependent. This is the point that Dr. Boss overlooks in all this, yes all life will start out as simple amino acids and microbes but they won't stay that way over the long haul because their habitat would change on them and kill them off. This is also the theory about Mars, that at one time it was more Earth like and simple life was on it. As the planet aged the enviroment changed and the simple life on it could not cope with those changes and died off.

I'm not saying expect every planet out there to have intelligent life on it but I think you will find that most will have advanced out of the microbe stage to at least planet life on planets that have water. The ones that have very little to no water will be barren and have no life at all. So when you look at planets that have water I think you will find a bell curve with most having plant life on it, with rudimentary animal life. The most advanced ones will have those thosands of intelligent life forms the Univeristy of Edinburgh worked out.

[pfors]

I think you're reading entirely too much into the quote from Dr Boss, and still manage to missread what is there. He's not saying they'll be inhabited by lifeforms identical to what Earth was like three billion years ago but:

"...things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." That means bacterial lifeforms.

And as I explained in my previous post, a planet supporting an entirely bacterial ecology is more likely than one supporting "higher" life. And that is really all that Dr Boss is saying; that we shouldn't get our hopes up of finding very complex life nearby, but that bacterial life could be quite likely. (How likely of course depends on how likely life is to originate in the first place, something we don't really have any data about, so any probability given would be entirely speculative.)
Bacteria have ruled the Earth for four billion years, they live in the deep sea bottom, in geothermal vents, in your intestine. There are more species of bacteria in a spoonful of dirt than there are mammal species on the planet. Nothing short of a disaster on a scale that would completely boil away the oceans would have a chance to wipe them out. On the other hand, a disaster on a much smaller scale would be capable of destroying most higher life forms, including humans. So the disaster argument is really in favour of simpler lifeforms. (As a side note, a koala may not be very intelligent, but it's every bit as complex a lifeform as a human.)

Now back to the topic of genetics and evolution in Fel's universe. Here's a question: Why didn't the ancient Karinnes simply breed the genes that define the Generations into the entire house? If they are dominant enough to survive intact through more than 30 generations of human interbreeding it'd almost be difficult not to. And with just a little bit of effort it could easily have been accomplished within a few generations and wouldn't really have interfered with the project of separately breeding for the strongest ones.

[boballab]

On the Karinne angle about why telepathy and the Generations have to be dominate Genes fall back to basic Biology. Treat Telepathy as eye color for now with Telepathic represented by the color brown and non telepathic as blue.

http://museum.thetech.org/ugenetics/eye ... lator.html

When you look at that link you see that if you get just one copy of the Brown you will have Brown eyes even though you might have 3 blues in there. The reason is that Brown always overrides Blue when it comes to eye color. So to get Blue eyes you have to have 4 copies of Blue anything else overrides it. Now lets translate that to Telepathy. At the time of the Karinne landing on Earth we will simplify things and forget anything doing about the connection between humans and Faey prior to this point. At this time the only Brown eyed genes are in the Karinne, all the Humans have Blue eyes. Now since we know all it takes is one copy of the Brown to get Brown eyes any pairing between that Karinne and a Human will have a Brown Eyed child. Since the Child has Brown eyes any pairing that he has with a Blue eyed Human will again produce a Brown eyed Child. This will continue down through the centuries because Brown is Dominate over Blue, if it was reversed the Child of the original pairing of Karinne and Human would have Blue eyes and Brown would have been bred out of the Human race at that point. So if Telepathy wasn't dominate the first child born to a Faey/Human pairing wouldn't have been telepathic. Simplistic way to look at it but it works.

As to why the House of Karinne wasn’t all Generations at the time of the destruction of Karis basically has to do with snobbery and not wanting to inbreed too much. After the Gene therapy (which was only done to the nobles, commoners need not apply) some of them died, some were unaffected and the rest changed. At this point you still don’t have a Generation, that didn’t come about until Sora was born. From there they treated the Generation basically like how Humans treat a show dog, you had to have the right pedigree to mate with one and with the same results that you get between pedigreed Show dogs of a breed compared to Non pedigreed show dogs. They bred for particular traits that you don’t get in the Non Generation nor the Non Pedigreed Dog. Of course Evolution, being the tricky bugger it is, shits on that every now and then. Just like you can get a Dog with Show qualities out of a Non pedigree mating you get the same thing out of the breeding for telepathic strength and Yana is a prime example.

[pfors]

Since the Child has Brown eyes any pairing that he has with a Blue eyed Human will again produce a Brown eyed Child.

Actually that is wrong, it's perfectly possible for two brown eyed people to have a blue eyed child. If we keep it to the simple example:
A child of one blue eyed parent (that is, a parent with two blue genes) and one parent with two brown genes (the Karinne in your example) would have one brown gene and one blue. Because the brown gene is dominant, the child will have brown eyes, but he will still carry the blue gene. This child will in turn pass either of those genes, with equal probablility, to each of his children. So a child of two people with one brown and one blue gene each (thus both brown eyed) would have a 25% chance of being blue eyed.

Now the Generations (I don't know about telepathy, but maybe it's the same) don't seem to work like that. It appears that if either parent is a Generation, it is certain that the offspring will be as well. At least this is the strong impression one gets from reading the books. This doesn't make much sense from a genetic standpoint. But setting that aside without active suppression a gene like that would spread like wildfire and very quickly saturate the population. Given that Karinne were breeding for particular traits, there must have been Generations excluded from the breeding programme for not showing those traits strongly enough. Instead of allowing these people to have a normal life and family, the House must have prevented them from mating at all. It seems the Karinnes actively didn't want their people to be Generations, which makes no sense considering their obsession with talking to computers. Another thing which makes no sense is how Jason came to be the only generation on Earth, since there was at least no active suppression there. Having a single surviving descendant after 30-40 generations is extremely unlikely.

Anyway, I think I'm going to drop this here. Thinking too much about the science of a fantasy story ruins it.

[boballab]

True two brown eyed parents can have a Blue eyed child thats if both parents have the recessive blue eyed gene, but what you are overlooking here is that there is no non telepathic Faey (At least Fel hasn't shown any). If Telepahy is dominate over non telepathy you will over the centuries start weeding out the recessive gene (if there was one), just like here on earth the number of humans with blue eyes is dropping. So in the example given those Karinne that came to earth didn't have any non telepathic recessive genes.

The thing to remember about the Generations program is that when it was started we don't know how many of the Karinne Nobles were changed by it. All we know is that House Karinne was a small minor noble house even back then. We only know 6 Generations by name from between the time the first Generation was born until the destruction of house Karis (Sora, Zuy, Maeda, Gora, Zera and Koiri). So we don't know how many Generations were of the first Generation so we really have no idea how many of each following Generation there was. The only indirect evidence is that the number of Karinne nobles had to be atleast 173 since Jason's ancestor was 173rd in line for the Karinne throne. Also to note Cybi tells Jason the whole point of the Breeding program is not to raise numbers but to make the Generations better able to Commune with a CBIM they were looking for quality not quantity.

[Dreamer]

I hate to burst your analogy, but eye color does not come from just one gene (two alleles), but 3 genes (six alleles). But in essence, you arguments are correct. Also regarding the statistical impossibility of two similar lifeforms evolving on two separate planets that can interbreed (remember that this is a work of fiction). Also I would like to point out that the statistical probability of life forming anywhere in the universe (not just within a single galaxy) is so far into the improbable that the biblical analogy of trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle comes to mind.

[pfors]

We were just simplifying it to use as an analogy, I don't think anybody who's actually observed the variability in eye colour would believe it's that simple. Eye colour is the standard example of dominant/recessive genes (probably more because it's easily observable than because it's a very good example) and the simplification is also pretty much standard, so it's not strange that boballab chose to use it.
As for the probability of life originating, we simply don't know how probable or improbable it is. It could be as you say, that it's so improbable that we're almost certainly alone in the universe and the only reason we could think otherwise is due to the anthropic principle (observer bias). But it could just as well be that life is no more unlikely than it'll be almost certain to originate within a few hundred million years wherever the conditions are just right. Our understanding of the phenomenon is not complete enough to have confidence in theoretical predictions, the low probabilities involved make lab experiments unlikely to shed complete light (they may help our understanding some, but when 'once in a million years' is considered a high probability we shouldn't expect too much) and for now we don't have much in the way of observations to go on (we have observed life on exactly one planet, and since we live there it doesn't really count). Once we've either found life on a few more planets or found a lot of planets extremely similar to Earth but without any life on them we'll be in a better position to make an informed guess.

[boballab]

The problem of syaing that statiscally that other life in the universe doesn't exist is many fold.
First we don't know how many galaxies there actually are in the universe. We don't know how big each of those galaxies are, nor how many stars they each have, nor how many of those stars fall with the range of being capable of supporting life. We are still at the stage of being shut in a small room looking through a keyhole to see what is outside.

[Mad Monk]

Well, folks, there has been an article on the statistics of life in the universe in the International Journal of Astrobiology:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7870562.stm

There are also theories that indicate that the building blocks of life may have been "seeded" from space, a theory called panspermia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

This would indicate that there is a reasonable chance that life would follow similar developments, i.e. Carbon based life based on DNA.

Life on Earth certainly developed very soon after conditions became suitable, within a couple of hundred million years or less of there being a crust.

If the life on Earth spontaniously arose, (or arose because of the will of a "maker"), it followed certain chemical rules, again these led to RNA and DNA. If similar conditions arise on other planets, it is likely to follow a similar path, at least occasionally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life

If there is a race of "glactic gardeners," who farm planets, they could easily have the technology to genetically "tweak" species so that they become genetically compatible.

There was a lot of work done on hybrid species in Berlin Zoo in the 1890's, especially with the big cats and deer.

Some more info on animal Hybrids:

http://madfoolish.blogspot.com/2007/09/ ... imals.html

I'll let someone else talk about plants and the Human/chimpanzee hybrid from the 30's (it didn't happen by the way.)

[Fel]

You're essentially correct in that the genetic compatibility of humans and Faey would be statistically impossible if they developed on different planets. The Faey mark it off as Gora's Law, but the reality is quite different.

The Faey aren't native to Draconis. Gora's Law explains their genetic "nearness" to Draconian life, but the truth is, both the humans and the Faey descended from a common ancestor. They're splinter branches of the same race.

[boballab]

You're essentially correct in that the genetic compatibility of humans and Faey would be statistically impossible if they developed on different planets. The Faey mark it off as Gora's Law, but the reality is quite different.

The Faey aren't native to Draconis. Gora's Law explains their genetic "nearness" to Draconian life, but the truth is, both the humans and the Faey descended from a common ancestor. They're splinter branches of the same race.

Now that statement might clear up the mystery of why and how Zera Karinne came to Earth after the destruction of Karis. We know Zera was on a mission to a Rim system and was a xenobotanist. What if that Rim system was the home or a planet colonized by the parent race of the humans and Faey. If that was the case she could have found the location of earth from possible ruins there. It would also give them a reason for leaving it if the parent race is extinct. She could have found evidence of another planet that would be biologically compatible with her species, with a possibility of finding descendents of the parent race that could help her.