In military sf, I am more interested in the sf than in the military, especially when the action has not started yet. Most of the organisms on Bellevue, men, dogs and plants, are imported but we also find:
"...twistgrass pasture..." (FIVE, p. 390)
"...chicken-sized sauroids with short horns on their noses and lines of feathers down their forearms..." (SIX, p. 396)
It is difficult to imagine alien organisms without merely reassembling parts of familiar organisms:
chicken-sized;
lizard-like;
horns;
noses;
feathers;
arms.
If human beings had not arrived, would some of the sauroids eventually have become tool- and language-using bipeds? Not necessarily. As I understand it, there is no inevitability about the direction of natural selection. Organisms and their environments interact. If unintelligence has higher survival value, then that is what will be selected. However, if only by random processes, evolution moves in every direction it can. According to Poul Anderson's Is There Life On Other Worlds?, overspecialized animals, entirely dependent on a single ecological niche, become extinct when the environment changes whereas a different kind of species able to adapt its behavior might not only survive but also eventually become intelligent. And these sauroids sound as if some of then might start to manipulate their environments.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Also, I recall in some of Anderson's works comments to the effect that it helps for an organism not to be TOO specialized, to be something of a generalist. Not merely being able to survive when an environment changes.
We do see mention at times in THE GENERAL books that some of the sauroid life forms of Bellevue seemed disconcertingly intelligent, such as the "downdraggers" of the seas. I can see true intellience on Bellevue possibly evolving there given X number of millions of years.
Sean
Sean,
But generalism and ability to survive in changed circumstances are pretty well the same thing.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I was too vague, I agree. I should have added that primitive men, for example, had weak fingernail useless as claws. Which put a premium fist on using ad hoc weapons like rocks and tree branches, and went on from there to chipping and shaping stone and wood for tools and weapons. Which we get a glimpse of in Anderson's "The Little Monster." And other examples could be listed!
Sean
The thing about human beings is that we evolved for a moderately specialized ecological niche -- apex predators, rather like wolves.
The bone isotope ratio analysis of Old Stone Age humans shows a diet almost exactly like that of wolves. (Neanderthals are more like lions that way.)
But the way humans -did- it was more by evolving behaviors than by modifying their bodies -- though some of our physiological basics are very suitable for predators (our extreme long-distance running capacity and very efficient cooling system).
Even pre-human hominins, right back to -erectus-, show substantial evidence of being tool-using predators. Spears are -at least- 400,000 years old, found in association with the butchered remains of large animals (horses, mainly, at that site) and this is almost certainly a gross underestimate because wood survives badly over very extended periods.
Once fully behaviorally modern humans evolved, human numbers increased sharply -- the great evolutionary weakness of apex predators is that they tend to be very few in numbers, because they have to be much less numerous than their prey.
Humans got around this by developing hunting strategies based on conscious knowledge of, and manipulation of, seasonal food sources -- things like animal migrations -- and by storing food and migrating selectively so that they could exploit the -average annual- productivity of their environment rather than its -minimum annual- levels.
Humans seem to have been at least ten times as numerous as Neanderthals in the same environment, for instance.
Retaining an ability to supplement prey animals with plant foods, and to use things like fish and birds without needing to develop physical specializations like seals or wings, made this even more so. Humans could exploit a range of niches in any given environment that would require a dozen specialist forms for other animals.
So humans got the benefits of specialization and generalization at the same time -- and could carry that ability into virtually every environment habitable by mammals at all.
Ditto our ability to manipulate foods after hunting or gathering, so we could get more food value per unit and eat things that were inedible to us without processing.
Eventually this led to more and more conscious manipulation of things like seasonal plants, and eventually the development of agriculture and full domestication of plants and animals.
Ironically, we probably developed the mental abilities required for this extremely fine-grained knowledge of and exploitation of our physical environments for entirely different purposes -- due to social manipulation and reproductive competition putting a premium on reasoning and symbolism. This generalized intelligence could then be used on the non-human environment.
NB: we became very numerous -for a predator- before agriculture, but only as numerous as large -herbivores- after it. For example, there were probably something like 40,000,000 or more bison on the plains of North America.
Humanity's total global population didn't exceed that until the late Bronze Age. We didn't become the most common large mammal until quite a bit later than that.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for your very interesting and clarifying comments. Briefly, humans are both specialists and generalists, with Homo Sapiens being more so than Homo Neanderthalensis. I rather like Neanderthals and wished they had survived!
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
Well, according to 23andMe, I have some some Neanderthal genes, although fewer than the average 23andMe customer, so in a sense, they did survive. Whether one would find full-blooded Neanderthals likable is a question that can no longer be answered; very probably, different individuals had different personalities, and different bands had somewhat different cultures, as with our breed.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Of course I agree with you! The likability of particular Neanderthals would depend on the individual and, in part, on their varying cultures.
And I too almost certainly have some distant Neanderthal ancestry. Their genes survived mostly among Caucasians and Asians.
Sean
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