"Ridiculous, Laure thought. Coincidence isn't that energetic."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 725.
In Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, a human diplomat and an alien interpreter agree that races as similar as peas in a pod are:
"'...statistically unlikely to the point of impossibility...'
"'...wildly unlikely to the point of ridiculousness.'" (CHAPTER VI, p. 74)
The interpreter adds:
"'Therefore, we of Rargyll know that God is a humorist.'" (ibid.)
In that case, they agree with Nicholas van Rijn who says in "Lodestar" that God makes surprises maybe just for fun and might be playing a joke on the theorists in the supermetals affair.
Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson wrote fiction set in the same physical universe.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't expect/believe evolution on even very terrestroid planets to result in races and life forms to exactly duplicate each other--that would indeed be absurd. But I do believe the conditions in which life exists on such worlds can lead to similarities and parallels. E.g., evolution might lead to races with one head concentrating several senses near the brain, and to forelimbs becoming arms with hands, etc.
Similarities and parallels does not have to mean being exact duplicates.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Note that the biological basis of even superficially similar species -- the cellular structure and DNA equivalents -- would be wildly different.
Note also that lie as it currently exists on earth -- dominated by mammals -- is the result of an accidental catastrophe, the asteroid impact of 66 million years ago.
Without that, dinosaurs (birds, essentially) would still dominate life on earth.
That's "life" not "lie", above... typing fast...
A reptiloid in an Asimov story say, "What are Terrestrials, after all? Nothing but mammals. Mammals that can think, certainly, but mammals all the same. Evolution must have laughed when she gave a brain to an ape!"
Kaor, to Both!
I agree, exactly what I was trying to say in my first comment.
Merry Christmas! Sean
I am going out for a while so I'll catch up with comments later.
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