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Thread: sexy+2 advantage

  1. #46
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    My god! Worf's trip back in time might have infected the Klingons on K-7!!! Perhaps that is what started the change! That in one timeline, it was created by Klingon geneticists, but when Worf went back in time to K-7 and carried the disease that started the change, he himself caused it! That is why Klingon science was unable to find a cure... they were looking in all the wrong places!

    I can just imagine Klingon doctors and scientists trying to find out the cause of infection... checking Tribbles, quadrotriticale, humans... of course Worf was long gone back to the future. If the plague of forehead-wrinkling had occurred around the geneticists, they would have had a clue about what was going on and had a fair chance if stopping it. This would also explain the popular fan theory that the Tribbles were the cause of the klingon forehead-wrinkling. They weren't, but the Klingon doctors THOUGHT they were...

  2. #47
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    Looking at some of the other threads, it sounds like Enterprise might dramtically disprove or possibly add evidence for this hypothesis. That's good - a hypothesis has to be disprovable to be useful.

    (that is to say, there must be some conceivable circumstances which will show your theory is wrong. If those circumstances come up, you are wrong. If they don't, you haven't proven your hypothesis by any means... but you can gather more evidence. But if there is no concivable outcome of any experiement that can show your wrong (what if the entire universe is really a perfect illusion, so perfect it is impossible to distinguish from reality in any way whatsoever?) then it's not science but possibly philosophy.

  3. #48

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    Those are all good point Alderon and back up your arguements well.

    However the fact remains that Star Trek has confronted us with these half-breeds, and while the simple fact is all the actors are human and that is probably where the whole mess comes from.

    Thing is I like the on screen evidence and it seems that no matter how much I agree with what you are saying in a 'real-world' sense, while I am in the Star Trek fictional universe, It seems that I will agree to disagree.

    You have previously said that you dont allow such cross genetics in your games. So I would be interested in your explanation of the known characters as seen in the shows? Do they exist or are single genetic markers?

    ------------------
    DanG.

    "Hi, I'm Commander Troy McClure, you might remember me from other academy training holo-simulations as, Abandon Ship, the quickest way out, and I sense danger, 101 things you dont need a Betazoid to know..."

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  4. #49

    Wink

    <font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by spyone:
    Dan:

    Good catch. I forgot all those.

    Any others I've forgotten?

    </font>
    Found some otheres.

    Human-Ktarian
    Human-Cardassian - Chakotay never worried that seska's child was his...
    Cardassian-Kazon - Seskas child was Maje Cullahs.
    Human-Bajoran - We may not have seen a cross-genetic example, but Kira carried the Yoshi O'Brien to term, thats gotta count for something.
    Human-Trill-Klingon - Watch DS9's 'Children of Time'. Nuff Said.


    ------------------
    DanG.

    "Hi, I'm Commander Troy McClure, you might remember me from other academy training holo-simulations as, Abandon Ship, the quickest way out, and I sense danger, 101 things you dont need a Betazoid to know..."

    http://www.theventure.freeserve.co.uk

  5. #50
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    Say, whatever happened to the tricorder which was used by the genetic program as an output device? Did it survive? Was the program erased? I can imagine a whole research project studying it, just to determine aesoteric bits of knowledge about the Perserver's computer science choices. The preservers probably had to develop an operating system specific to the task of encoding itself on DNA.

    Even the smallest crumbs of such knowledge might be of non-insignificant value to Federation genetics science. Even if it wasn't used for genetic resequencing or supermanning projects that the Federation eschews.

  6. #51
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    Unhappy

    It seems that some of the posters here are disgusted by inter-species sex. If they are not, I apologise for even bringing it up.

    Compatible or not, all humaniod(?) creatures on 'Star Trek' are considered equal. They have the same rights, and have similar bodily functions (most of the time). They think alike, drink alike etc. When it comes to love and sexual intercourse, they can certainly be considered 'consenting adults'.

  7. #52
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    Dan,
    Yep, I agree with your point re: Trek canon vs scientific fact with regard to genetics!

    It's probably the single hardest thing I have to reconcile in my games, so I sort of do it by pretty-much sweeping it under the carpet as much as possible!!

    Truth is, it rarely comes up. My players simply know they cannot (without some damned extensive background development, an incredibly good reason, not to mention a hefty bribe to me! ) take the "Mixed Species" advantage in my campaign.

    Those people like Spock, Troi, etc, are oddities. Their parents didn't (in my game universe) conceive naturally - it took extensive genetic manipulation to do so.

    The way I have it set up is that due to the Progenitor's encoding of DNA, each humanoid species DNA is pretty darn close, due to the planned convergent evolution I talked about earlier. I know this seems to be at odds with what I was arguing in those posts, but it's not, really. Humans and Betazoids are still separated by four billion years of evolution - just having similar DNA doesn't make them closer to us. How many people would have sex with a chimpanzee, even knowing that 98% of theirs and our DNA is identical?

    So, basically, the Progenitors have set our (all our) DNA up in such a way that our evolution was directed to eventually form a shape similar to the Progenitors.

    In doing so, the DNA which diverged dramatically for billions of years has, in the last few million (perhaps in response to a galactic event - maybe the sending out of a subspace signal five million years ago that marked the death of the last Progenitor...hmmm, now there's an idea forming...) started to converge. Nucleotides and markers have started to conform to a set pattern, introduced originally into the primordial soup of each world. (Note: I'm not talking about the "program" here - that's always existed. I'm talking specific humanoid characteristics).

    So now, the humanoid species which can interbreed can do so (with great difficulty) because the genetic markers match with about 99.5% consistency across most of them (compared to a chimp's 98%).

    This isn't so bizarre, really. Consider that we share about 85% genetic commonality with a rabbit and about 30% commonality with an E. Coli bacterium, and you'll see where I'm coming from. If the Progenitors were such masters of genetic manipulation as to encode a program algorithm from 4 billion years ago, scatter it across at least 19 planets, and leave enough clues for an intelligence to find it, I don't think it was too hard for them to arrange for the DNA to begin to follow a set pattern at some stage in the future, eventually leading to the evolution of a sort of Ramapithecus-analogue on each planet, and continue in the same vein.

    There...I've said that all in one breath, and it didn't make a lot of sense. I'm aware of that - trying to explain the inexplicable makes my head swim. I agree completely with Diamond that they should have made us all lifted up by the Preservers 100,000 years ago and dumped on all these worlds. It would have explained things a lot better!

    So by and large, we just pretend the problem doesn't exist in our game!

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  8. #53
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    Thumbs down

    >How many people would have sex with a chimpanzee, even knowing that 98% of theirs and our DNA is identical?

    That's NOT a matter of genetics, but of aestetics.

  9. #54
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    Good thinking Aldaron re: subspace signal. Of course, if that was the case the correlary of that is that proto-humanoids can sense subspace in at least some rudimentary format. Of course, that effect sounds more familiar under another name: more likely the galactic signal was psionic in nature.

    Given the large number of trek-cannon examples of interspecies fertility, I'm not willing to accept that it doesn't happen. You don't change the data points because it doesn't fit your theory. You change the theory. And Dan Gurden has come up with a lot of examples that I had forgotten about.

    Clearly, the Preserver's DNA-encoded program was VERY efficient at bringing humanoid genetics towards the "ideal" point (as defined by the Preservers). In fact, that fits the evidence in another way... if the program was keyed to keep pruning the genetics until it was at a certain point, reproduction would be likely to be kept rigidly on-track. Minor things like facial bumps wouldn't be as closely scrutinized by the error-correcting software.

    * * *

    I REALLY like the idea of a bio-computer program encoded on the DNA, regulating future development. Is it original? because I can't think of any science fiction I've read on that premise. Incidentally, the Preservers would also have to have an excellent knowledge of biological sciences (ecology). That would be necessary in order to deterine how much freedom of action to give their little DNA-encoded software. Too much directives from the program and not enough changes are made by evolution... and the experiment dies off because it's not fit enough. The program must strike a careful balance between speed of results and survivial rate. Of course, they didn't care about speed of results much so that was an OK tradeoff.

  10. #55
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    Cool

    Let's see how well you hold up in a hottub with three Orion slave women.


    "I can't, this is wrong, this is wrong.... wrong me! wrong me!"
    ;-)

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  11. #56
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    Thumbs up

    Diamond, you've got a thing going there.
    It might even explain the Paris-syndrome: The 'genetic computer' goes haywire because at warp ten, it monitors everybody's DNA, and packs up.

  12. #57
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    Those are some excellent points! Clearly my memory of that episode was indeed hazy, and the distinctions are critical. It just made so much more scientific sense for the Preservers to have spread humanoids around. That would fit what we've seen on the screen in terms of intra-species fertility (Sarek and Amanda) and very elegantly tie in all of those TOS episodes with near-humanoids.

    But elegant theories must yield to evidence. If one species spread DNA destined to form humanoids (like humans and vulcans and klingons) and then ANOTHER race must have translocated human cultures... putting native americans on one planet with the asteroid-deflector, Yangs, Magna Romans, and those lot. I was willing to fudge the timing... after all, when Spock was dating the native american colony as a few tens of thousands of years ago, he might have botched his physical science (physics) or someone else botched a social science (anthropology) skill roll. That would allow the Preservers to be the same as your Progenitors.

    Given the evidence that that race did seed primordial DNA, we've got a problem. That shouldn't explain why there are humanoids around. And as a correlary, humanoids shouldn't be interfertile, but we know they are in some cases. Perhaps that race did a little more than JUST add primordial DNA... although they did that too.

    I've got a wild theory that would account for this dillemna AND fits very well with their technical abilities as shown in "the Chase". Perhaps the DNA that they dropped in the primordial soup of all those plants was more active in it's evolution than us 20th century people have discovered. The Preservers showed us in that episode that they can encode an EXTREMELY sophisticated computer program in the DNA. And of course the Preservers had to have been master geneticists. Perhaps they encoded the DNA with a computer program that modified it's own subsequent evolution so that it WOULD create a humanoid. That our evolution was not natural but rather produced as a result of that computer program.

    This fits in other ways as well! Perhaps facial ridges are the result of a minor bug in the code. After all, there's something about the humanoid face that is *difficult* to produce... at least so says Odo, who can never quite get the nose right although it is tremendously simpler than the other forms he takes on.

    And the Klingon foreheads!!!! The increased facial ridges could be a result of genetic damage caused by inadvertantly modifying the Preserver's program! Imagine Klingon geneticists trying to improve the race... create Klingon Kahns. They accidently flip the wrong bit... and the result seriously messes up their foreheads. Given the right labratory mistake, it could even be contagous! That would explain Worf's gruffness prefectly. And the Klingon clone of Kahless might have been re-infected during it's creation or growth... after all, the klingon acolyte/technitians creating him could still have been carriers.

    Thanks. I think you just gave me the inspiration I was looking for to hang my Star Trek campaign around. There are a LOT of implications to such a scientific discovery...

  13. #58
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    Good thinking, Rob! And hey, that reminds me: remember the TNG episode where the crew regressed, de-evolved to animals that were in some case not part of their ancestry? (spiders and humans share a common ancestor, but humans did NOT evolve from spiders) Clearly genetics was not acting like 20th century science thought it should. Something strange was going on, some other factor... although it's not clear to me how even a buggy Preserver-DNA-program could have caused that, but maybe I could dream up some reason if I saw that episode again.

  14. #59
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    <font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">. I agree completely with Diamond that they should have made us all lifted up by the Preservers 100,000 years ago and dumped on all these worlds. It would have explained things a lot better!</font>
    Thanks Aldaron. You've fully convinced me that my original position was not correct trek-cannon. I just like things to make sense.

  15. #60
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    Diamond...
    I love the idea of the signal being psionic in some way. It reminds me of the "Empress Wave" from Traveller: The New Era, where a bizarre psionic wavefront is propagating across the galaxy at the speed of light.

    Now that I think of it, it could well explain why there are so many humanoid and proto-humanoid cultures at such various levels of development.

    Why are the Mintakans so far behind, technologically? Because the signal, travelling at lightspeed, hit them a thousand years or so after more advanced species...I dunno. This idea needs work, but I think it has possibility...

    Whaddya guys think.

    Oh, hey Rob!
    Sex with a chimp may be a matter of aesthetics, not genetics, but it puts a whole new twist on the term "Punch the Monkey", does it not?

    Oh, boy - that's enough. Time to get my medication again...I've got a really bad 'flu at present, and I'm pretty much off my face on medication for it.

    That's why I'm a little more bizarre than usual, at present!



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    "Every atom in our bodies was forged in the furnace of ancient stars - it is our destiny to return home..."

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