Mesan Genies outside the Onion

tlb wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Psi Corps. And Mr Bester..now there was a villain you loved to hate.

Theemile wrote:Best part of Bester (and any good villian for that matter), was not that he was evil, but actually a true believer in a cause, and one that had actual, believable goals and interests. His Machiavellian nature just intensified his character (as one would expect in any senior member of any such cause).

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I defy you to prove that Bester was wrong. Consider the Neanderthals and the Denisovians. They had Europe and Asia to themselves. Then they were invaded by mutants from Africa.

I do not know how that follows, since Bester was a Psi Cop hunting renegade psis; so in this analogy, he was one of the mutants.

Oh, no.......you are confusing the very thin line between what started with the people who 1st put together the underlying principals of Psi Corps and the people who founded the Alignment.
In both cases you take something that humans have and both work at amplifying it and improving portions of the human DNA.
Psi Corp is not (that we know of) doing any gene manipulation but they are breeding Psi talents. The Alighment initialy was doing variations of gene splicing and then branched out. In the Psi Corps case it was after ONE particular thing- the Psi talent of reading minds (and or essentilay being lie detectors like the Treecats are in relation to humans- are things true//false, is there harmful intent or not, is there intended deception -for whaterver reason.

Alignment is activly experimenting with the genome to do all sorts of things

Both are not so much "mutants" as one is a targeted breeding program that is (more or less) doing it the old fashioned way by Selective Breeding and the other is slicing and dicing human genetics and adding non-human things and creating a new set of (in their own minds) striations of types of humans (Star Lines) and anything else that has some human genetics.

Mutant in must science fiction ususaly carries a conotation of some delibeate aberation introduced by intent or some agent of the enviornment that creates a very new type of the organism. Like Scrag Super Soldiers or a population that changes -usualy fairly quiclkly like 20+ generations such that they can no longer sucessfully interbreed with viable offspring of the original "strain" of the species. Psi Corp wasn't doing that but it was till aiming at a "superior" Psi human.

Psi Corp was very much traveling down the same path as the Alignment. They were BREEDING people with measurable Psi talent to enhance the talent in their offspring. Bester saw the members of the Psi Corps as the ones who would let the Psi talented portion of humanity take their rightful place in the control of the rest of humanity. They were also looking for ways to gain both knowlege and possibly medical information from races like the Vorlon about enhancing the talents.

I read too much.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I defy you to prove that Bester was wrong. Consider the Neanderthals and the Denisovians. They had Europe and Asia to themselves. Then they were invaded by mutants from Africa.

Don't forget the Cro-Magnons, though those died out a bit earlier. (Unless you're in another sci-fi universe, Sliders)

Quick correction: the H. sapiens sapiens had long since left Africa. They were no more and no less "from Africa" than the Neanderthals and the Denisovans themselves were.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I defy you to prove that Bester was wrong. Consider the Neanderthals and the Denisovians. They had Europe and Asia to themselves. Then they were invaded by mutants from Africa.

Don't forget the Cro-Magnons, though those died out a bit earlier. (Unless you're in another sci-fi universe, Sliders)

Quick correction: the H. sapiens sapiens had long since left Africa. They were no more and no less "from Africa" than the Neanderthals and the Denisovans themselves were.

The arguments and theories about when and where who encountered whom continue to evolve as does what happened to the vareients of humans when they encountered each other. At this point the majority of the theories have Neanderthals (at least) interbreeding with Cro-Magnon and so forth as is identified in the DNA found in Neanderthal remains which is found in perhaps up to 5% in modern humans. No, I don't remember how that percenteage varies with "race", but it seems we all have some. The Denisovians ongoing contribution is much harder, primarily because we have a very much smaller set of partial remains identified as Denisovian from which to build a model.

The door is still wide open on exactly how the interactions went with the people who inhabited much of Europe and out into at least the western part of Asia and down into the edge of the Middle East as new data comes in. That would be in part from new discoveries (or able to look at older examples with new capabilites) and the various fine tuning of who was part of what culture in a given time frame- a lot based either on type of grave, grave goods and other things along with where they were found.
Yes, there were certainly what we would consider wars going on but that wasn't the only thing happening. One set of theories has a mostly more gradual movement of groups as they expanded their range (of influence, of where they lived, of how they lived, of what they traded) such that the "earlier" hunter-gatherer groups were not exterminated but both either move away, became incorporated into the new groups (generaly better stability of food for example) or various levels of interbreeding/intermarrage. There are a lot of books written on these topics.
Various cultures are more inclusive than others. And then there are the theories that have ruffled the feathers of those who hold the "invaded, took everything and kept a few women while killing the men" view. Intermarriage as a policy/cultural approch to changes in all sorts of things is one of the things that seems to be showing up or at least the interpritation attached to some things. Learning from the new group, aquiring skills and knowledge and sharing kinship. Again- from reading- some of the theories have some (spread over time in long ago) populations (based on human remains/DNA) are being interpreted as the women from a distant group (in a give time range) arriving 1st and the genetics spreading into the "local" group and becoming more prevelent from those women. Again, from remains and this is theory.

What we do seem to know is that all present humans are capable of sucessfully having offspring with member of every other present human group. Yeah, I know, there are a lot of things that stand in the way of that but most of those fall into cultural/religious areas, not biological ones.....and that truly annoys some people so I'm going to let this drop.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence how often when the peaceful traders show up the village burns down, the men all die and the valuables and the women vanish? Probably just bad luck.

But yeah, there are all sorts of interactions going on, of various types. A lot of assumptions about non-HS hominids have been shown to be incorrect, they clearly were capable of much more creative and organized behavior than expected.

I had forgotten that Bester was a telepath.

All of this theorizing ignores the fundamental reality that what matters is what genes get passed down. All considerations of genetic fitness are interesting but not critical. Whichever groups' males are most adept at inseminating their own females as well as the other groups'females are going to be passing down more of their genetic heritage while the other groups' genetic heritage recedes. Robert Sawyer described it well in his HOMINIDS series. The Neanderthal Neanderthal females were so disagreeable most of the time that the Neanderthal males would run for the hills unless the females were ovulating. They depended upon the Neanderthal nose knowing when to visit. Modern human males were more willing to tolerate the abuse and were therefore more likely to have more opportunities to inseminate the females prior to and during ovulation.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I had forgotten that Bester was a telepath.

Not just a telepath, but a very powerful one; which is why he had his position in Psi Corps.

PS. The point about the Neanderthal female being disagreeable most of the time has to be something out of fiction, since there is no way to know that. Unless that is why the men had to keep painting on the walls of the caves and doing other household jobs.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I had forgotten that Bester was a telepath.

You forgot that the Psi-Cop was a Telepath?

I admit that he was idiosyncratic even by those standards but he was the embodiment of "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father".

He was seriously into the Corp's selective breeding and genetic development program. He was actually married with children, although it was an arranged pairing for the good of the Corps, there was no real affection. When the Psi-Corps fell he abandoned his family, apparently without remorse, he was afterall a psychotic sociopath.
Also a quite insightful literary critic.

edgeworthy wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I had forgotten that Bester was a telepath.

You forgot that the Psi-Cop was a Telepath?

I admit that he was idiosyncratic even by those standards but he was the embodiment of "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father".

He was seriously into the Corp's selective breeding and genetic development program. He was actually married with children, although it was an arranged pairing for the good of the Corps, there was no real affection. When the Psi-Corps fell he abandoned his family, apparently without remorse, he was afterall a psychotic sociopath.
Also a quite insightful literary critic.

It has been decades since I watched Babylon 5. I have also be lethal dead, twice. Sometimes I need a bit of reminding.