Very close to my thoughts, we could niggle over details that quite frankly are personal taste. For example sugars instead of protiens as the main structural...
Well, you'd be right about sugars. During the dinosaur and earlier period, arthropods reached phenomenal sizes (though now they are restricted by the Oxygen...
Plants here on Earth also use sugars to build tough coverings, hairs, flexible parts, stiff internal 'bones' etc, all structures that might be found in mobile...
... Now THAT is thinking outside the box! A skeleton of tough oak-like material, instead of brittle stony bones, would be an improvement. ... More than two...
Re: Furthermore, if only one sex is the "mother", that puts an even greater burden on that sex to reproduce more often, in order for a species to maintain its...
... Wonderful! The problem (at least for me) of being fairly knowledgeable about biology is that I do tend to "think inside the box" of terrestrial life. I...
Yeh, I tend to favour carbon-water life because of my biological knowledge, I just can't get too far away from that. Then again look up 'mortar rot', to see...
... to me ... Well yes and no. Surely it depends on the conditions said organism is currently living in? If for example species X is in a very overcrowded...
... Alan: The fallacy in your argument is equating what's good for the species with what's good for the individual. If you're really interested in the effects...
... Nein nein , no fallacy. Perspective only. Organisms with very high predation rates shit out lots of little uns. Organisms with lower predation rates have...
... I think (hope) I was careful in my post to speak only of competition between members of the same species, not between different species. Certainly...
Um, I think Niven actually explained the business about the third, unrelated host species in the original RINGWORLD; Nessus was describing the matter of...
"But the situation would still require figuring out how to combine *three* sets of genes during reproduction, instead of just two. *Much* more complicated!" ...
... Sorry, but you misremember. There is no reference to digger wasps in /Ringworld/. That's in /Ringworld Engineers/. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ [Nessus said,] "Some...
... Possibly you were, and I am sure that that is a worthwhile and interesting distinction (quite possibly vital) however the slap down approach of your post...
Looks like I do misremember, at that. Interestingly, though, the seeds were well planted in the original RINGWORLD. Niven was very careful, in that nothing the...
... Quite true. Perhaps it's unfair of me to label this a "retcon" (retroactive continuity). I suppose that depends on exactly how you define a retcon. Is...
... The clues that Nessus is female, or at least might be, are actually quite prevalent in /Ringworld/ if you look for them. In the scene on the Puppeteer...
 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081010/ap_on_sc/sci_shark_mystery parthenogenesis we spoke earlier of three sex reproduction  here is one sex reproduction in a...
sorry for crossposts, my time is short today a virgin birth of shark was "proved" so how would parthenogensis help, as a permanent or limited fashion , specie...
... Parthogenesis ought to work just fine with any sexual creature, so long as the duplicated chromosomes (or equivalent) produce a complete genome. Mammals...
i dont want to start a problem here, but there was a book called the bell curve a few years ago, that postulated some pretty interesting things, maybe bizarre,...
Now you got me thinking. What if Puppeteers also tried to engineer parthogenetic kzitten production in Kzin? :-) Hmm. An idea. And having found out that...
Not sure how I blundered upon this. Did somebody on this group give me this URL? http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/alternative_forms_of_life.html ...
... I don't want to start a problem here either, but I think everyone should be aware that there have been charges that the book is a defense of racism. (I...
In and of himself, I dont Think Harnnstein was trying to be racist or sexist, but I think he felt he was setting an alarm he did however have quite few...
