Its core is probably osmium and uranium and might even be solid instead of molten.
For information about its sun, see here.
Was Jaccavrie jealous of Laure's closeness to the Kirkasanter woman, Graydal? See here. Of course not. However, her apparent jealousy is explained. She tried to discourage Laure's interest in Graydal after she discovered that the Kirkasanters, who are instinctually compelled to have children, are intersterile with the humanity of the Commonalty civilizations.
Could Graydal marry Laure and be artificially inseminated as Sean suggested in the combox? I suspect that the Kirkasanters have old-fashioned ideas about procreation. Indeed, they refuse to permit chromosome analysis because this violates the integrity of the body which is the citadel of the ego. They do not say "soul" or "sanctity" but they have equivalent secularist ideas.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
More exactly, I wondered if Graydal would assent to using her own DNA to become pregnant. Even tho she would only be able to have daughters using that method. I was thinking of cloning, IOW. And she did consent to having cells taken from her body for chromosome analysis, so cloning might not be impossible for her to accept.
Sean
We're on the verge of being able to artificially breed closely related species -- it's a matter of chromosome incompatibility. I would expect the age Poul's discussing here to be able to do that easily, so besides the biological difficulty there must be a cultural problem forbidding the use of reproductive technology.
We could probably soon produce a fertile chimp-human hybrid, for example.
Humans and chimps have a complex evolutionary relationship. Besides having a relatively recent common ancestor, during the process of evolutionary divergence, we and they didn't make a "clean break" -- there were repeated episodes of hybridization while the species were diverging. The original divergence was probably quite a while ago -- 6-12 million years -- but there were episodes of hybridization as recently as 4 million years ago.
So the genetic distance between standard humans and Kirkasanters would probably be much less than between humans and chimps.
Incidentally, while humans and Neanderthals (and Denisovans) were interfertile, this was an "only just" compatibility -- fertilization was much less likely, and hybrids would have reduced fertility themselves, with severe negative consequences for most offspring. This is why Neanderthal DNA has been 'selected out' of the human genome in most respects, which ancient DNA studies show.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I was VERY interested by your comments. Albeit, I find the idea of chimp/human interbreeding revolting, even if the ancestors of humans and chimps occasionally did that up till about four million years ago.
I think I first came across ideas like this from reading Mortimer Adler's THE DIFFERENCE OF MAN AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES and Jean Vercors novel YOU SHALL KNOW THEM. Adler discussed the issues raise by Vercors book, when a human artificially inseminated a recently discovered Paranthropus female and then killed the resulting offspring. Because he wanted to prove in a trial for murder that these archaic primates were human beings--and hence the infant he killed was not an animal but also human.
But, yes, the genetic difference between more or less ordinary human beings and Kirkasanters has to be far less than that between humans and chimps.
I like the Neanderthals and it does please me to know I very likely have SOME Neanderthal ancestry.
Sean
Post a Comment