theory of evolution

[Kaziarl]

Ok, so I'm trying to come up with a concept for an alien race for a fanfic I'm working on. This seems to be the place to discuss ideas, so here I am. Now, we've seen all kinds of races on trek. Most of them are humanoid, and even the insects act like humans. So I'm trying to do it a little different. I want an insectoid race that thinks like an insect. I've tried doing some research on my own, but have come up with diddly. So I pose the question, how might something like Ants evolve into a sentient race? What kind of culture, how would they relate to eachother and other races?

 

[FordSVT]

The Borg were originally conceived as an alien insect hive race to tie in to the alien parasites from Conspiracy,but it was deemed too difficult and costly to put numbers of believable humanoid insects on screen at the time.

So there's your answer, they might be like the Borg. Or, at least, TNG Borg.

 

[Kaziarl]

The Borg were originally conceived as an alien insect hive race to tie in to the alien parasites from Conspiracy,but it was deemed too difficult and costly to put numbers of believable humanoid insects on screen at the time.

So there's your answer, they might be like the Borg. Or, at least, TNG Borg.

Thats what I would like to get away from though. The borg are more like one single mind. Infact most fictional sources have a "we are the borg" kind of hive mind.

I want this one to be unique, more like they do have the hive aspect, but are still individuals. Honestly, much more scary then the single mind overpowering the individuals in my opinion.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Yep, hive mind thing. Insects would be a species that acts bizarrely and frighteningly like a single unit - could be a very efficient and successful type of intelligence.

Also the aliens in Alien seemed to be a plausible type of intelligent insect species, with a flexible species "model" - you have the facehuggers being just one phase of the lifecycle - together with the drone-type aliens and the queens, which lay the facehugger eggs, they all comprise one species.

If you want to make these insects more individualistic, you could play off the Selfish Gene theory - the notion that humans are just vehicles by which our genes perpetuate themselves. The genes control our behaviors and our notion of individual volition is something of a sham. We think we are individuals to more of a degree than is actually true and in fact, we are all hive minds of DNA.

The delusion of individuality may actually be a way by which the DNA ensures its survival, by making each individual human "unit" more pro-active about survival than if it were simply a mindless drone.

 

[TigerOfDarkness]

This sounds interesting. A few random thoughts on the subject:

H G Wells First Men In The Moon presents an insect race.

The aliens in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Mote In God's Eye aren't insects but they do have different specialisms - each one is a member of a sub-species that is physically adapted for different tasks. An alien insect species might be like that.

Would all the aliens be sentient? Would the workers, soldiers etc. be less intelligent than the thinking ones (an administrative caste, perhaps)?

As I understand it, in a social insect colony only the queen can produce offspring. That would make her vitally important, but would she necessarily be sentient?

 

[Kaziarl]

Yep, hive mind thing. Insects would be a species that acts bizarrely and frighteningly like a single unit - could be a very efficient and successful type of intelligence.

Also the aliens in Alien seemed to be a plausible type of intelligent insect species, with a flexible species "model" - you have the facehuggers being just one phase of the lifecycle - together with the drone-type aliens and the queens, which lay the facehugger eggs, they all comprise one species.

If you want to make these insects more individualistic, you could play off the Selfish Gene theory - the notion that humans are just vehicles by which our genes perpetuate themselves. The genes control our behaviors and our notion of individual volition is something of a sham. We think we are individuals to more of a degree than is actually true and in fact, we are all hive minds of DNA.

The delusion of individuality may actually be a way by which the DNA ensures its survival, by making each individual human "unit" more pro-active about survival than if it were simply a mindless drone.

That is definitely an interesting idea with the DNA Temis. I might have to go look that up. the Aliens from Alien are a good example, but we don't really know what kind of mind they have. Or atleast I don't remember anything about it.

So I've been working on this today, and here is a couple of rough ideas I have for them.

* They are insectoid, looking much like the Praying Mantis.
* The hive aspect of their minds is known among them as The Chrysalis. The Chrysalis lies in the back of each of their minds, much like the conscience in most humanoids. However, all members of this race share it.
* Although it is a hive mind, the Chrysalis does not control actions. Each member has their own thoughts.


Any thoughts on this?

 

[Kaziarl]

This sounds interesting. A few random thoughts on the subject:

H G Wells First Men In The Moon presents an insect race.

The aliens in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Mote In God's Eye aren't insects but they do have different specialisms - each one is a member of a sub-species that is physically adapted for different tasks. An alien insect species might be like that.

Would all the aliens be sentient? Would the workers, soldiers etc. be less intelligent than the thinking ones (an administrative caste, perhaps)?

As I understand it, in a social insect colony only the queen can produce offspring. That would make her vitally important, but would she necessarily be sentient?

Sorry, missed yours. Must of went up while I was typing the other one.

HG is a great author, and I've been meaning to read Ringworld, which if I remember right was by Niven.

This race is going to be sentient. The will have a fairly rigid caste system, with certain 'body types' being breed for specific types. In that sense they will be very similar to ants with having warriors, gatherers, nursers, the queens guard, etc... Their empire is comprised of several worlds, each one being it's own 'ant hill' but on their home world, where they originally evolved, they have the high queen. She excretes a specific enzyme that the other queens need to be able to reproduce. In that way, the hives have their own structure, but they still answer to the home colony.

 

[Shawnster]

Not all insects are colonial/hive minded. Praying mantis, locusts, grasshoppers, etc... Locusts do swarm but grasshoppers and praying mantis seem more individualized. If you want to get away from "insects" specifically you can also look at various arachnids (spiders, scorpions) or other type of bugs (millipedes, centipedes, etc...) I personally have toyed with ideas of insect races based on grasshoppers or some non-hive type. Hive insect races seem to be the cliche. You may find it interesting to research various bugs and insects and see how they function in real life, then proceed from there.

Or you can do a mixture of hive and individualism. Your specific race tend to congregate together and never live alone. They view their job/ship/whatever as their hive or colony and are completely devoted to their boss/captain. While they do express individual taste and preferences they do not have any concept of personal property or privacy. Just a suggestion.

Another example of a good alien insect species is in CJ Cherryh's book "Serpent's Reach".

 

[Kaziarl]

Not all insects are colonial/hive minded. Praying mantis, locusts, grasshoppers, etc... Locusts do swarm but grasshoppers and praying mantis seem more individualized. If you want to get away from "insects" specifically you can also look at various arachnids (spiders, scorpions) or other type of bugs (millipedes, centipedes, etc...) I personally have toyed with ideas of insect races based on grasshoppers or some non-hive type. Hive insect races seem to be the cliche. You may find it interesting to research various bugs and insects and see how they function in real life, then proceed from there.

Or you can do a mixture of hive and individualism. Your specific race tend to congregate together and never live alone. They view their job/ship/whatever as their hive or colony and are completely devoted to their boss/captain. While they do express individual taste and preferences they do not have any concept of personal property or privacy. Just a suggestion.

Another example of a good alien insect species is in CJ Cherryh's book "Serpent's Reach".

I'll look up that book, thanks.

Its not that I want to get away from insects. After seeing so many bipedal, almost human looking aliens, I want something different. I chose the look of the mantis, cause I think they are awesome. And while I do want a hive aspect, it's the over powering single minded borg type of hive that I'm trying to get away from. I always felt the borg would be more intimidating if it was many individual minds that could focus on one task, instead of the one, single collective consciousness.

 

[urbandk]

Yep, hive mind thing. Insects would be a species that acts bizarrely and frighteningly like a single unit - could be a very efficient and successful type of intelligence.

Also the aliens in Alien seemed to be a plausible type of intelligent insect species, with a flexible species "model" - you have the facehuggers being just one phase of the lifecycle - together with the drone-type aliens and the queens, which lay the facehugger eggs, they all comprise one species.

If you want to make these insects more individualistic, you could play off the Selfish Gene theory - the notion that humans are just vehicles by which our genes perpetuate themselves. The genes control our behaviors and our notion of individual volition is something of a sham. We think we are individuals to more of a degree than is actually true and in fact, we are all hive minds of DNA.

The delusion of individuality may actually be a way by which the DNA ensures its survival, by making each individual human "unit" more pro-active about survival than if it were simply a mindless drone.

Then wouldn't every human "unit" want to ensure that he reproduces?

Would homosexuals and those who consciously decide not to have children be defective units?

 

[The Badger]

Another suggestion for reading material is Heinlien's Starship Troopers. The Bugs in the book, though very different from humans, are certainly intelligent (they build and carry energy weapons!). Sadly the book does not go into a great deal of detail about their society, other than the idea that it is 'perfectly communist'.

Ignore everything from the films!

 

[xman]

I think this is an opportunity to explore radically different morality. It might be perfectly acceptable to murder and even cannibalise a member of their species for their thoughts alone. Perhaps they sense this as a disturbance in the Chrysalis and we outsiders would never know why one has savaged another. They might then look on incredulously as we endlessly debate topics.

Just thinking out loud ...

X

 

[skep155]

Their senses and how they view the world would be very different. One of the reasons why Mosquitoes can still find you in the dark to feed on your blood is because they can smell the toxins and sweat that form on your skin and they can detect the carbon dioxide in the air when you breath out. Nightime wouldn't be very scary for a sentient moth/mosquito or mantis because they would be able to 'see' using their sharp sense of smell. In some ways a geat sense of smell is better than the sense of sight, for one you could smell around corners, you could smell the area where something used to be and determine how long ago it was there based on the strength of the odour, then you could track the odour through the air. We would find it hard to hide our emotions from "the smellers" if they learned what chemicals we give off when we are nervous or scared i.e sweat. they could even detect when we are lying i.e if your conducting a tense treaty with them and you stink like a sweaty armpit they might figure that you have something to hide. Likewise if they had a sharp sense of hearing they would be able to monitor the sound of your heart beating in your chest to detect an elevated heart rate.

A sentient race of insects would likely have to evolve on a low gravity world , the reason we don't see many insects larger than a tarantula on Earth is because they are invertebrates and require some form of exoskeleton to support them, in Earth gravity environments the weight of their own exoskeleton would probably crush them. When exploring space this would probably limit their sphere of influence to smaller Earth like worlds and M class planets the size of Mercury would be very valuable to them. Face to face encounters would also obviously be limited to their own planets and ships.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Yep, hive mind thing. Insects would be a species that acts bizarrely and frighteningly like a single unit - could be a very efficient and successful type of intelligence.

Also the aliens in Alien seemed to be a plausible type of intelligent insect species, with a flexible species "model" - you have the facehuggers being just one phase of the lifecycle - together with the drone-type aliens and the queens, which lay the facehugger eggs, they all comprise one species.

If you want to make these insects more individualistic, you could play off the Selfish Gene theory - the notion that humans are just vehicles by which our genes perpetuate themselves. The genes control our behaviors and our notion of individual volition is something of a sham. We think we are individuals to more of a degree than is actually true and in fact, we are all hive minds of DNA.

The delusion of individuality may actually be a way by which the DNA ensures its survival, by making each individual human "unit" more pro-active about survival than if it were simply a mindless drone.

Then wouldn't every human "unit" want to ensure that he reproduces?

Would homosexuals and those who consciously decide not to have children be defective units?

Not if they increase the odds that relatives will survive. For most of human history, humans have lived in small family tribes. Envision a homosexual male 15,000 years ago for instance. He lives in a tribe surrounded by his siblings, cousins and their children - together the children constitute more than 100% of his DNA.

A sibling shares half your DNA and a niece or nephew is 1/4 (more if you assume the other parent is also somewhat related, which would be hard to avoid in the small-tribe/low population density scenario). All it takes is four nieces and nephews to equal one you. Five = more than you, therefore it makes sense to sacrifice your reproductive capacity (or even your life) to save five nieces and nephews.

A tribe can only support so many kids; it might enhance the survival of all the kids if some adults are not reproducing. You see the same phenomenon in wolf packs where only the alpha male and female reproduce and the whole pack cares for the cubs. The non-reproducing wolves are also following the "commands" of their DNA. That's a scenario under which homosexuality might be selected for, under natural selection. It also explains why people other than parents will sacrifice their lives for relatives, especially children.

Anyway if anyone wants source material, read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

 

[The Badger]

^ Good explanation. And anyone who references Dawkins gets a from me.

An alternative suggestion is that the gene that 'causes' homosexuality or celibacy (it would actually be a lot more complex than that: I'm simplifying to more easily explain this) could have a beneficial effect under different circumstances.

For example, and this is pure speculation on my part so don't take it as gospel, a gene that in men causes a tendency towards homosexuality might in women cause more nutritious breast milk. The offspring of a woman with that gene would be more likely to survive, and thus pass that gene on.

 

[Myasishchev]

The thing to figure out is what kind of environment you want your species hailing from.

Skep155 is totally right to point out that a high-gravity environment would be deadly to an insect species. Ways to ameliorate this, however, are extremely high O2 content in the air and/or very efficient O2 extraction mechanism for lungs, but ultimately a human-sized arthopod is going to likely need to be from a less-than-1G world.

I'm doing a story in which there is a Horta character, which has compelled me to think of how their society would be. It has significant insectoid qualities, particularly in that in any given Horta colony, only one individual expresses female sex characteristics and lays eggs. Surely she doesn't communicate with her thousands of children by sound, either. Nor can she communicate visually, in the darkness beneath Janus IV--in all likelihood, the Horta are quite blind. A sophisticated language of pheromones supplemented by braille-like script in their tubes, however, would be sufficient and plausible.

Now I just have to work out how silicon based pheromones work. I know of no silicon compound that is a gas at anything approaching room temperature.

The point is, think about its habitat, and you should be able to convincingly describe its traits.

 

[Kaziarl]

The thing to figure out is what kind of environment you want your species hailing from.

Skep155 is totally right to point out that a high-gravity environment would be deadly to an insect species. Ways to ameliorate this, however, are extremely high O2 content in the air and/or very efficient O2 extraction mechanism for lungs, but ultimately a human-sized arthopod is going to likely need to be from a less-than-1G world.

I'm doing a story in which there is a Horta character, which has compelled me to think of how their society would be. It has significant insectoid qualities, particularly in that in any given Horta colony, only one individual expresses female sex characteristics and lays eggs. Surely she doesn't communicate with her thousands of children by sound, either. Nor can she communicate visually, in the darkness beneath Janus IV--in all likelihood, the Horta are quite blind. A sophisticated language of pheromones supplemented by braille-like script in their tubes, however, would be sufficient and plausible.

Now I just have to work out how silicon based pheromones work. I know of no silicon compound that is a gas at anything approaching room temperature.

The point is, think about its habitat, and you should be able to convincingly describe its traits.

These ones certainly do come from a low-G world. As they evolved, they found a way through medical science, and technology to both strengthen their exoskeletons, and to take some of the weight off their shoulders.

About the horta though. iirc, they all laid eggs. Then all but one died, and that one cared for the eggs until they hatched.


I also got the impression that there was some kind of genetic memory involved as well.

 

[Myasishchev]

I thought the mother Horta didn't die till some time after the children hatched. It's implied that the act of mating kills the males, however--they must have lived long enough to breed with the mom, but were dead shortly afterward.

Although for a basically hive creature like the Horta, you'd think there'd be tons of soldiers to defend the colony. Maybe their status as the dominant life form on Janus afforded them the ability to do away with drones and soldiers through selection, which in the absence of direct competition would be wastes of resources. One might think that they'd at least be able to defend themselves from opposing, fully-populated colonies of Hortae. Hard to square.

You know, thinking on it, there's no particular need for your insect life form to be human-sized. A hive could theoretically display effectively sapient behavior without its individuals being sapient, just as I am sapient without my individual neurons doing so. It would afford some interesting exploration of the nature of consciousness. Would the aliens be truly conscious, or just the arthopodic equivalent of Searle's Chinese Room?

 

[Kaziarl]

The mother Horta, born around 44773 BC, was the last of the Horta species of Janus VI until stardate 3196 in 2267. Every 50,000 years every Horta dies except for one, who watches the eggs until they begin to hatch.

Thats what it says on MA. It doesn't really go into detail, but I could have sworn they mentioned they were androgynous... wow, i spelled that right on the first try... amazing...

Anyway, I could also be completely wrong about that. The only other sources of information are non-canon, which do make a distinction between male and female.

 

[The Badger]

Horta would presumably have some way of seeing, as the one we saw had learned to read and write in English!