Of course, according to Paradigm, the Andorians are apparently ancient astronauts. Who happened to bring along a crypto-angiosperm flowering plant. And nothing else. So yeah. Also of course, Paradigm does mention that the Andorians are dying out, but it's hard to believe it's been a successful adaptation until recently.
Ummm, haven't you missed a point here? (Or did I?) The Andorians were reluctantly assuming they must have been ancient astronauts, because of their failure to find even native crypto-angiosperm flowering plants on Andoria that matched the same groups-of-four paradigm as themselves. In Heather Jarman's novel, they
do find the long-forgotten flower, meaning that the Andorians
are native to the moon after all, and that they have some new experiments that can be made, to aid in the race to thwart their own extinction.
Wait,
that was the point? I thought it just meant that Andor could sustain a four-sex paradigm, that they weren't alone in the grand cosmic sense, not that they actually
were aboriginal.
I mean, shouldn't there be an identifiable, if incomplete, fossil record on Andor, and the results of DNA comparison and other genetic experimental methods, militating either for or against an extraterrestrial (extralunar, whatever) origin? Ancient astronaut theory is pretty easy to more-or-less disprove on Earth, because we can look at other organisms and know that we are related to them. If there were ancient astronauts on Earth, they came so far in the distant past as to make no profound difference regarding our place in the universe (although it would suggest some interesting stuff about likelihood of life elsewhere in the real world--but this an observation that is roughly as profound as "the sky is [insert color]" in the Trek universe).
In other words, if the Andorians aren't ancient astronauts, they should know it as soon as they've grasped the interrelation between themselves and the rest of their biosphere, and even if they didn't somehow,
we could tell them. If every other creature on the planet has a radically different genome from their own, they would still probably understand the interrelationship
concept because it would be evident in all the other life, with their own species being the only aberration.
With a human mindset, this would almost certainly lead to a far more enduring concept of mankind as created separately, in the image of God, and probably a retardation of materialist philosophy, although it would also likely foreclose many of the great arguments about evolution as a concept, since it wouldn't offend human dignity, we being obviously detached from the process. However, I wouldn't speak for aliens in that regard, particularly moon-dwellers who would likely have an earlier understanding of cosmology than us terrestrials. While we were puzzling over the nature of planets, they would probably have a good idea of the concept from close observation of other moons, and perhaps figure out much sooner that life, arising elsewhere through the same mechanisms that life appears to have arisen on Andor, might have come from another rocky body.
But anyway, it's easy to disprove ancient astronaut theory, so why would anyone accept it at all unless the evidence for "andogenesis" is so lacking that the alternatives are "a Wizard did it" or the unlikely event of a family tree nearly completely lost, except for a flowering plant that is barely related. There's a lot of missing cousins and uncles between bipedal sapient and flower...
Further, I'm not sure the four-sex paradigm would at all mean a radically different genome from the two-sex creatures. It would need some kind of history, which does appear to be lacking (I doubt two-sex Andorian biped crypto-primates could have evolved, in the span of a few million years, this bizarre paradigm), but it need not be a radical genetic departure from the two-sex type. Great differences in phenotype arise from comparatively small differences in genotype. If they use a chromosomal system for sex-determination, for example, the chromosomes that so determine might be different in detail and number from the two-sex organisms, but still relatable to other life, and the other chromosomes and their genes could be much more similar than that.
Finally, even if they were ancient astronauts, I'm not sure what the angst is about. Clearly they've prospered over several thousand years. Do the Romulans, who have been there for less time, worry that they might die out because Romulus' nature did not create them, and might not accept them?
Deranged Nasat said:
Okay, I know you're talking about the naked mole rats as one, but I must admit my ignorance- what's the second? Or are there two species of naked mole rat?
Sorta. The damaraland mole rat is another species of the family bathyergidae, to which the naked mole rat belongs, but the damaraland variety is from a different genus (cryptomys versus heterocephalus [unfortunately, I don't know why it's called
different head, which would be a good name for a band]). But anyway, close enough for government work, and I wasn't aware of the damaraland mole rat till I was confirming some stuff about the naked mole rat.
Oh, and to be fair, isopterans (termites) are eusocial but not sister-related like hymenopterans (ants, wasps, etc.) I remember them being very very weird--so the no-gametes-for-zhavey thing is not downright
impossible, but I'm still gonna call it unlikely...
Or maybe the Andorians are some sort of odd experiment by alien biologists, an elder race doing some meddling? They tested the idea on a flower first, then decided to see if a viable civilization of sapients could be made using this highly troubling system. It worked...for a time, but such a system couldn't sustain itself, soon it was falling apart and now we have the Andorian genetic crisis?
Though this is a variant of the Wizard Did It Hypothesis, it's a pretty good one--sort of like the Vorlons and telepaths, which isn't strictly good science for a lot of reasons (telepathy is barely explicable, and hardly so with otherwise standard human biology, and telekinesis is pretty much right out because of a lack of mechanism and energy concerns), but it does make much more sense. In this case, it's actually quite plausible. Although one wonders why aliens would go about it, maybe as a grotesque experiment to see how big an orgy you can make to produce one child before it stops working entirely.
I also have to wonder aloud how the ancient humanoids fit into this. Wouldn't the humanoid body plan include the sexual dimorphism? (And interbreeding capabilities.
<---Closest to vomit we have.) Or are the Andorians outside the ridiculousness of "The Chase"?
One last point, because I am not long-winded and boring enough, but the zhavey hormonally influencing the child doesn't really make her any fitter in an evolutionary sense. She's still not advancing her cause, making new one-quarter versions of her.
Edit: but on the other hand, Therin's notion of zygote storage (mirroring real-life examples of long-term sperm storage, e.g. chickens, and ants and termites of course) is pretty interesting, although it'd make more sense were it quasi-fertilized and waiting for the last gamete to show up to the party.
(Although, while writing that, it occurs to me that I myself am a gay man, a natural occurence not designed to contribute - genetically at least - to the procreation of the species. But WOW is that a whole other discussion.)
But it
does increase the fitness of brothers who do genetically contribute, by reducing competition for females. I hadn't thought of it in a eusociality context before, although after a fashion, it is. It's not brother-relatedness in the same sense that female ants are highly related, but it's the same concept.
Indeed, for male heterosexuals, the more male homosexuals, the merrier...
That certainly helps.
, to make, sad as that might sound. I like keeping track of all the connections made, and speculating on those bits that are incomplete or don't 100% add up. I like collecting it all into one big universe. It's the modern novel continuity plus canon, but there's more to it than that and this is where it becomes personal. Bits from older novels, RPG sourcebooks, etc, that don't contradict any of the modern continuity or canon I include (the rest I don't, and it's entirely on my whim- there's no claim to objectivity 