The Domrath prepare to move from their village at Seething Springs to their hibernation ground at Mt. Thunderbelow. An approaching Merseian offers, by radio, to help with transportation:
"The Dom hesitated. A primitive's conservatism, Flandry recognized. He can't be sure airlifts aren't unlucky, or whatever. Finally: 'Come to us.'" (p. 289)
Even before he has seen a Dom, Flandry's xenological knowledge enables him to interpret a hesitation and to recognize primitivism. Of course, any particular intelligent species might respond differently but enough species are known that generalizations can be made.
Centuries earlier, Nicholas van Rijn had learned to interpret alien psychologies, sometimes, though not always, by analogy with others:
"'I see now what the parallels are. Xanadu, Dunbar, Tametha, Disaster Landing...oh, the analogue is never exact and on Cain the thing I am thinking of has gone far and far...but still I see the pattern, and what happens makes sense.
"'Not that we have got to have an analogue. You gave us so many clues here that I could solve the problem by logic alone. But analogues help, and also they show my conclusion is not only correct but possible.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 273-327 AT p. 321.
(I think that possibility comes before correctness?)
Merchants, Intelligence officers and explorers all need to know xenology.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I suspect Flandry's studies at the Intelligence Academy included courses in xenology with an eye to enabling field agents to quickly and accurately come to a basic understanding of most non human races.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Ydwyr welcomed Flandry's contribution both because he was of a different species and because he would know some xenology.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And also because, as a non Merseian, a human like Flandry would "see" things differently from how a Merseian would do it, to have unique a Merseian would not be likely to think of.
Ad astra! Sean
The empirical demonstration by analogy shows that the deduction is not only logically consistent internally, but corresponds to an outcome in the real world with other precedents, which is a good idea.
For example, if you look at human mating patterns, you find that 1 male + 1 female is most common, that 1 male + multiple females comes next, and that 1 female + multiple males does happen, but is quite rarte, confined to extreme environments (Tibet, for example) and almost always the men being closely related biologically (brothers, half-brothers, or cousins, in descending order of occurrence).
If you look into further details, you find that mating bonds are usually of some duration (four years or more); and that in cultures where pair-bonds are easily dissolved, then association of the children with the woman's male relatives is important.
You can learn more by comparison to our nearest evolutionary relatives, the chimps and bonobos, to trace the probable evolutionary pathways that differentiated us from them; and study of hominins adds further detail -- that pre-human hominins (like h. erectus) had maturation rates (growth between weaning and puberty/sexual maturity) that were intermediate between apes and humans. Modern humans have, and apparently had right from the emergence of the species, the longest "childhood" of any large mammal.
There are other animals that live as long as humans, though not many, but none that have as long a childhood. This very prolonged dependency period (and that's not counting the long infancy between birth and full mobility) almost certainly affected the human instinctual mating pattern.
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