Trek biology within canon is just terribly nutso right now. I mean, TOS wasn't actually bad for the time period it was done. But it's very clear that Naren Shankar, Andre Bormanis, and whoever else consulted for science in the TNG era just had no friggin idea how biology worked (Braga in particular - Genesis, Threshold, and Distant Origin were all embarassing). This isn't like the warp drives where they needed to invent weird technobabble to explain everything. They could have mined actual known concepts regarding how DNA works, the process of evolution, and paleontology and they just ignored it entirely.
Barclay turning into a spider was so confusing for me as a kid. I feel like the writers were saying, "What kind of animal would Barclay be really afraid of, and let's have him turn into that..." while warming themselves over a garbage fire fed with college biology books.
It's funny because I'm constantly reading news article about how much genetic similarity humans have to different animals.
That's quite the specific hobby you have there! In Star Trek, you don't need to be genetically similar to hybridize, you just need to look similar.
I just recalled the banana tidbit and while I agree that Trek's grasp on biology is limited, to say the least, the whole genetic similarity thing is not something I'm going to fault them for pursuing since it's being discussed and has been for a while, at least in every biology text I have had since high school.
1. We all share recent common descent - much more recent than the ancient humanoids would have provided in Trek (where the common ancestor was presumably bacterial grade);. 2. We can't interbreed and have fertile offspring with fruit flies, chickens, or bananas. Hell, as far as we know, we can't interbreed and produce any offspring with chimpanzees. I do wonder though if - similar to humans and Klingons mating - would it work for other animals? For example, could you cross a Targ and a pig?
I was more remaking upon the genetic degradation in to spiders or what not but whatever at this point. Star Trek's biology makes as much sense as most science fiction I've read.
You must read a different kind of science fiction than I do. Most of the science fiction books that I can think of which involve biology written say past 1980 or so (books by Greg Bear, Nancy Kress, Robert J Sawyer, Stephen Baxter, Paolo Bacigalupi, etc) had fairly rigorous use of genetics when genetics was integral to the plot. Now, obviously if I'm reading Olaf Stapleton or something, I'm not going to expect things to be accurate. But that's different, because it's historic fiction by this point.
In first peoples from PBS it talks about the two million year limit for primates to interbreed Humans could interbreed with any species of hominid that was within two million years of us, as Chimpanzees, and bonobos are five to seven million years seperated from us, we could not breed with them. https://www.amazon.com/Americas/dp/...&qid=1535144522&sr=8-1&keywords=first+peoples
Also, an author can take a year or longer to write a book. They have the time to do a lot more research. (Rob Sawyer is a friend of mine, and I know he does a ton of research - he talks about it a lot. He's currently working on an alternate history of the race for the atomic bomb, and the amount of historical research he did is staggering.)
My wife is an author and is working on a novel set in mid 1800s New York, a city she is not familiar with. Yeah, the research is insane O_O
They were, as you pointed out, consultants - the equivalent of Kellam de Forest Research for the original show. They can provide advice to the writers, but they don't have veto rights over anything.
Yep, they're pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order. I don't know how many writers and producers are gonna go "Oh my god! The science is wrong!!! Scrap everything!!!!!"
There is a huge difference between "We have genetic similarities" and "We can flip on a gene to make you a spider-man."