Musings: Andorians, Triexians, Bajorans. Random thoughts.

[Therin of Andor]

Technically, though, the writer of Data's Day only stated that Andorians marry in groups of four. S/he did not state that it was because there were four genders.

Not to mention that "fanon" had speculated three Andorian sexes since the 70s. Prominent ST fanwriter and filker, Leslie Fish, suggested A Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture in 1976, and elements of her work cross pollinated into other fan writers' works of the day.

http://andorfiles.blogspot.com/2009/09/summary-of-physiological-roots-of.html

 

[Myasishchev]

The writer of TNG's "Data's Day." Although Austin Powers isn't out of the question.

Technically, though, the writer of Data's Day only stated that Andorians marry in groups of four. S/he did not state that it was because there were four genders. It could have been simple polygamy, or even two couples marrying, but at the same ceremony.

True; I'm not denying Jarman's creative leap from simple foursomes to the four gender thing.

Therin, I like the "birds, bees, seahorses and kangaroos" picture in that.

 

[Therin of Andor]

True; I'm not denying Jarman's creative leap from simple foursomes to the four gender thing.

It wasn't Heather Jarman, it was SD Perry working with Marco Palmieri, in "Avatar" and then spelled out in "Unity", with additional extrapolations from Heather in "Paradigm".

 

[Therin of Andor]

Therin, I like the "birds, bees, seahorses and kangaroos" picture in that.

Yep, I find it fascinating that Leslie Fish was dabbling in this way back in 1976, Marco deliberately avoided looking at my archived site of Leslie's work (because he had to) when they were planning the post-series novels - and yet the "the birds, the bees, the seahorses and the kangaroos" still fits with Perry's and Jarman's novels' take on Andorians.

What is at the opposite ends of the spectrum is that Ms Perry extrapolated underpopulation, and eventual extinction, from four sexes. Ms Fish claimed the three-sexes paradigm to be so "efficient, in fact, that over-population has been a primary social problem throughout all recorded Andorian history".

 

[Myasishchev]

True; I'm not denying Jarman's creative leap from simple foursomes to the four gender thing.

It wasn't Heather Jarman, it was SD Perry working with Marco Palmieri, in "Avatar" and then spelled out in "Unity", with additional extrapolations from Heather in "Paradigm".

Well, I am proven wrong. I always thought Jarman invented/resurrected/appropriated/refined/whatevered it.

Anyway, underpopulation would probably be a more likely outcome, though--arranging a two-body collision is hard enough.

 

[Vestboy]

Anyway, underpopulation would probably be a more likely outcome, though--arranging a two-body collision is hard enough.

Seriously. As hard as the whole thing is on Shar in the DS9-Relaunch, with four genders there would almost have to be a cultural mandate that boiled down to, "You four! Mate, damn it!"

 

[DevilEyes]

Regarding the Andorians, what's really needed there is a flowchart showing how gamete transfer mechanically works.

During the conception of an Andorian child, the chan adds his gametes to those of the shen, which have already been fertilized by the thaan. The zygote is then implanted into the zhen's pouch. [Unity (Pocket, 2003) by SD Perry.]

Either Memory Alpha or Memory Beta (or possibly mainstream Wikipedia, who can keep them straight?) claims within the same paragraph that while all four gametes are required for fertilization, the zhen does not contribute any genetic meterial to the zygote, but instead merely acts a mobile incubator. I commented in the "discussion" pane that it can't be both, so which is it? I never received an answer.

So from what I can tell, with apologies to the sensitive, the process goes as follows:
a) thaan ****s shen
b) chan ****s shen
c) shen ****s zhen.

Wow, the shen sure get a lot of action!

But I want to see some hardcore thaan-on-chan action, dammit!

Nah, that would be like two men getting it on... can't have that in Trek, can we? Two chicks, that's OK, but two guys...

I'm pretty rusty on my biology, but I would think each of the four "parents" would have to contribute genetically. The way it works would, clearly, have significant differences from our own. The equivalent of spermogenesis and oogenesis would spilt in fourths, instead of halves, for one. I'm still trying to hash out in my head what the equivalent of XX and XY would be for a four-gendered species, how that would work.

Of course, presuming you have four contributers, then that chromosome would have four components, and you could still do it with only two types. For example:

Chan: XYYY
Shen: XXYY
Zhen: XXXY
Thaan: XXXX

Now, a flaw I can see in this methodology (which might be part of why the Andorians were dying out) is (unless my math is bad) you're going to get, on average, more Shen and Zhen then Thaan and Chan. And therefore your number of viable mating groups drops, and thus the population drops.

(And this might be, also, what happened on Andor over the eons: most of the other four-gendered species died out due to this imbalance.)

Are those completely random combinations, with X and Y standing for nothing in particular? If not, I am even more confused. Why would a thaan have a combination more similar to a zhen than to a chan?

 

[Vestboy]

I'm pretty rusty on my biology, but I would think each of the four "parents" would have to contribute genetically. The way it works would, clearly, have significant differences from our own. The equivalent of spermogenesis and oogenesis would spilt in fourths, instead of halves, for one. I'm still trying to hash out in my head what the equivalent of XX and XY would be for a four-gendered species, how that would work.

Of course, presuming you have four contributers, then that chromosome would have four components, and you could still do it with only two types. For example:

Chan: XYYY
Shen: XXYY
Zhen: XXXY
Thaan: XXXX

Now, a flaw I can see in this methodology (which might be part of why the Andorians were dying out) is (unless my math is bad) you're going to get, on average, more Shen and Zhen then Thaan and Chan. And therefore your number of viable mating groups drops, and thus the population drops.

(And this might be, also, what happened on Andor over the eons: most of the other four-gendered species died out due to this imbalance.)

Are those completely random combinations, with X and Y standing for nothing in particular? If not, I am even more confused. Why would a thaan have a combination more similar to a zhen than to a chan?

The "X" and "Y" in this case refer to two hypothetical sex-determining chromosomes, which form a base-quad in the Andorian-equivalent of our 23rd chromosome. "Ш" and "Ѳ" could work just as well. My point was to demonstrate that with base-quads, only two types are necessary to create four genders. The exact quad-combination to gender is just a suggestion on my part, and if someone has one that works better, by all means.

 

[DevilEyes]

I'm pretty rusty on my biology, but I would think each of the four "parents" would have to contribute genetically. The way it works would, clearly, have significant differences from our own. The equivalent of spermogenesis and oogenesis would spilt in fourths, instead of halves, for one. I'm still trying to hash out in my head what the equivalent of XX and XY would be for a four-gendered species, how that would work.

Of course, presuming you have four contributers, then that chromosome would have four components, and you could still do it with only two types. For example:

Chan: XYYY
Shen: XXYY
Zhen: XXXY
Thaan: XXXX

Now, a flaw I can see in this methodology (which might be part of why the Andorians were dying out) is (unless my math is bad) you're going to get, on average, more Shen and Zhen then Thaan and Chan. And therefore your number of viable mating groups drops, and thus the population drops.

(And this might be, also, what happened on Andor over the eons: most of the other four-gendered species died out due to this imbalance.)

Are those completely random combinations, with X and Y standing for nothing in particular? If not, I am even more confused. Why would a thaan have a combination more similar to a zhen than to a chan?

The "X" and "Y" in this case refer to two hypothetical sex-determining chromosomes, which form a base-quad in the Andorian-equivalent of our 23rd chromosome. "Ш" and "Ѳ" could work just as well. My point was to demonstrate that with base-quads, only two types are necessary to create four genders. The exact quad-combination to gender is just a suggestion on my part, and if someone has one that works better, by all means.

Well, if thaan and chan are supposed to correspond to "male", and zhen and shen to "female", with chan and shen the more androgynous ones, unless Memory Alpha is lying to me, it seems to me that it would make a lot more sense if it went something like this:

zhen: XXXX
shen: XXXY
chan: XXYY
thaan: XYYY

Kind of like in human genetics where the people who happen to be XXY are androgynous compared to most XY males. It seems to me that a shen should have a combination more similar to a zhen than to a thaan, and that a thaan should have a combination more similar to that of a chan than to a shen. Regardless of the whole androgyny thing, "female" zhen should have a combination more similar to "female" shen than to the other two, "male" sexes.

Your main point, however, stands - I did the maths, and unless I made a mistake in calculations, the statistical probability is that there would be just 3 thaans and 3 zhens to 13 chans and 13 shens. The four person marriage doesn't really make sense in that context, what do all those other chans and shens do? Or are they just free to have recreational sex and not participate in the reproduction?

But then, as you said, this might be the reason why they're dying out. Still, I don't see how they think it could be fixed with a four person marriage.