How humanity can affect the war, by turning the moon into a deathstar.

[boldilocks]

Usage of high heels has a determinate effect of altering the wearer's gait to a significant degree in a quite certain and measurable manner:

Attractiveness is an issue of aesthetics (and it's highly subjective); it's not what I would call a practical use. Loroi mating is pre-arranged; attractiveness doesn't factor into it.

It turns out day planners and post-it notes will be mankinds sexiest contribution to the loroi economy.

[Werra]

Indeed. But this does not contradict my point in any way.

It does, insofar as the traits the Loroi are endowed with, even the most basic, are not the result of human genetic information but instead given to them by the Soia.

So the Soia did not take a human brain and added telepathy, they built a brain from scratch that included those abilities.

In human image and likeness!

You're claiming that their outward similarity to humans translates to inward similarity of functions of biochemistry in detail.

Barsam are famous for lacking a sense of humor, and are earnestly serious at all times.

Fair point, I hadn't thought of that. But still, the full range of human emotions is not rare in Outsider. We've seen an Umiak laugh on page as well.

Also, Fireblade and her berserk state seem to hint that telekinetics is also to a degree instinctual.

That's emotional trauma, my man.

Which tells us nothing about how much of telekinetics is instinctual. The ability seems to be inborn in Teidar and Mizol too.

You can not claim similarity from skull shape alone.

But I can from the way they smile.

Not by itself. The way they smile is again just outward similarity in looks, not in function. You could make a case out of what Jardin noticed, that a telepathic species lols. But there can still be a multitude of reasons for that.

Have mercy, I don't want to spend all weekend on sci-hub.

Well, if you do find time, could you please check if there are any studies on Loroi genetics on there? Perhabs they're on google scholar?

Sexual attraction in humans is not based on hormonal reactions. It is based on cerebral processes, which in turn trigger, among other things, hormonal responses - many of which can affect cerebral processes in turn.

The hormonal reaction is a vital part of it. That's what makes it work. A sexual cerebral reaction to a stimulus is worthless if it doesn't tell the body about it.

But what we're working with here is the original trigger - we don't care much about what and how happens down the line as long as it works, and judging by blu boytoy performance hell yeah it works.

I thought your whole point is that Loroi males will show a reaction to high heels? Isn't that exclusively about whether the trigger works the same way? That Loroi males are interested in sex in general can't be taken as confirmation of specific attractions by itself.

Picture it this way - I'm pointing out how the spark plugs on an M4A1 Sherman's Continental R975-C4 engine are virtually the same as those on a Wright R-975-E3 engine mounted on a Curtis F9C biplane. You're pointing out that they have completely different cooling systems and throttle control, and FFS one's a tank the other's a biplane - I'm in turn pointing out that "yeah, but the spark plugs are probably the same, it's the same engine tuned for two different vehicles and, while they got different cooling and cylinder heads and shit, there was no need to change the spark plugs".

Genetics is a bit more complicated than that. Genes can have very different effects depending on the environment they're in. Biochemistry is hugely important for that environment. The spark plug from the Sherman in your example could become the cigarette lighter in the biplane, if warmachines were genetics.

But let's say that a Loroi brain does have an inherited reaction to high heels and thus produces hormones at their sight. That still doesn't mean that these hormones will then affect the body in a similar way to a human.

Their hormones are Loroi hormones and seem to work fine once the ball is rolling, we're figuring out what gets the ball rolling.

Problem is, you can't just take one type of hormone, replace it along with the whole accompanying biochemistry and then expect the same results. You'd definitely need to change up how things work to arrive at the same result.

No matter the selectors - a rapid shift in the environment (aka "a bottleneck event") will not introduce new forms.

Well, actually, gene expression is also dependent on what other genes there are. So a bottleneck that reduces genetic variance within the population can very well produce new forms. For which 300.000 years is plenty of time, honestly.

No matter how strong are your selectors, the evolution cannot happen faster than genetic divergence processes generate variance.

While that is true in some aspects, evolution is the process of genetic change in a population. That can happen extremely fast. A virus that whipes out every fat person in the next week, would change the genetic landscape of humanity practically overnight by severely cutting down genetic factors for obesity.

Not really, in fact it didn't change for shit aside from some drift - and really, really, really minor drift compared to what early human populations experienced. We're not gaining any traits and we're not losing any - we're having some frequency of occurrence for some of them change a bit.

The Bantu expansion saw the Bantu Y-Chromosomes replace most other African Y-Chromosomes. The Black Plaque changed European immune system so fundamentally that it is the suspected cause for an existing immunity to HIV within Europeans (around ~5% are strongly resistant, with less being immune, IIRC). Those aren't minor changes and we're constantly gaining and losing genes.

Genetic evolution kinda hits a tarpit once civilization starts to really happen. The mechanism of evolution pretyy much shifts into the neutral of genetic drift. Even if/when, say, ginger hair or blue eyes hit a critical of occurrence - the trait will not be lost, it will be widely spread across the population in recessive state, and will be inherited further with typical frequency, and with some minor chance will keep emerging from among fitting parents, and can only be really eliminated from the population with random drift with extremely low chance.

That's not how it works. Just because a gene could be in a global population doesn't mean it has to remain there. Also, gene expression is as important as the genes itself, which is dependant on the concentration of other genes in the population. So traits can easily get lost or even die out. For example a gene that is beneficial within say the Dutch population can be downright harmful for Japanese, as the Japanese population does not have coevolved genes that negate negative effects of the gene in question. All it takes for a gene to die out is other, more beneficial genes claiming that slot, for selective pressure to reduce the genes presence.

As far as it seems, they were not under a significant pressure of any selection through their history aside from usual the stabilizing selection - considering that Teidar traits are quite hereditary and stupendously advantageous, and yet they are still nowhere near dominant in the pool.

Telepathy alone is so different from humans that it changes society completely. Which means all the societal selectors would be different. Those selectors were absolutely massive in humans in a relatively short timespan.
Telekinetics are iffy, as Arioch has stated that they depend on more than genetics alone, so I'm loathe to discuss them.

Makes all the difference, as social selection in a civilization context gives very little shit about pretty much all genetic traits. Nurtured and circumstantial, largely non-hereditary traits start to run the show.

Sorry for being blunt, but that's not how it works. It makes no difference whether the selector is social or natural. Non-hereditary traits run no kind of show. They can't, because genes create their own environment. Consider that your own genes were already active in your parental generation to create the environment in which you grew up. Even if you were an orphan, your genes are already present in the rest of your people, who are responsible for the environment of your upbringing. There simply isn't any trait in humans that isn't affected by genes.

Haplotype is an alleles set that is inherited from a single parent. Loroi are diploid organisms with a single cycle sexual reproduction limiting haplophase to gametes. Every Loroi got a half of her genotype from his or her mommy, and the other half from his or her daddy. One haplotype from the left, one from the right.
Every conceived Loroi child gets a pick of half the genotype from one part of the population, and a pick of the other half from a different part of the population. It can't pick both halves from the more numerous and varied part.

In a given individual, half the genes will be from each parent, that is correct. But we're talking about population genetics. There the haplotypes don't have to be even between the sexes. If the Loroi have sex specific chromosomes, it's pretty much guaranteed that their haplotypes aren't evenly spread. It can be, for example, that Loroi males have an easier time passing on their genes and so there is less variance in haplotypes amongst females than in males. Or that the greater number of females also means that a greater variety of haplotypes exist among their population. If there aren't sex specific haplotypes, the whole point is moot.

Good thing that neutral traits are more likely to be preserved in the populace than lost. And in case you get confused and bring up what I explained earlier about the allelic loss caused by the sex ratio 'capping the haplotypes - this process leads to the loss of variance, not immediate loss of traits. If the presence of the trait is a part of the diversity, along with it's presence, it might be lost in the process. But the whole point is howe this set-up limits the likelihood of emergent diversity in which both presence and absence of the trait are observed.

Why would it have tradeoffs? Does it have any tradeoffs now, in us, who happen to possess it?

Every gene has trade-offs, even if it's just that an actually beneficial gene can't take up that slot. You are making the wild, unsubstantiated claim that attraction to high heels is a neutral trait in Loroi genetics and that it remained with the Loroi for 300.000 years.
Also, again, traits can easily get lost. "Civilization" doesn't stop that.

You do this based on little more than similar skull shapes

And, you know, similar everything else.

You construct behavioural congruence from outside similarity. Even if we were talking about two species of dogs, that methodology would see you laughed out of the room. You're doing this with two alien species that are different on the molecular level.

It wasn't repackaged. It was rewritten.

Irrelevant as far as content goes.

The content had to be changed to work at a lower body temperature.

Besides, even if the genetic information is completely identical, a different biochemistry means a different effect of the information.

Not effect - pathway of effects.

This means nothing. If the environment changes, gene expression can also change. Biochemistry is the environment, so even if Loroi had 100% identical genes to humans, their genes would express differently. "Pathway of effects" is just verbal noise, as a different pathway is a different effect.

It wasn't repackaged.
It isn't identical though, as human DNA is coded for proteins that work optimal at our body temperature. So at a minimum all the proteins and enzymes in a Lorois body need to be different, which has to be coded into whatever they use for DNA. Since changes in the DNA can have effects elsewhere in the organism, such drastic changes will by their nature require massive genetic rewrites.

Indeed, and in the end result there is no chance that they can still have lactating tiddies after all these extensive rewrites

Irrelevant point, as I've never claimed that the Soia did not endow the Loroi with similar traits to humans, just that this says nothing about the specifics. Surely it's prudent to treat macro-scale physical functions such as lactation different to specific molecular reactions such as effects of high heels on sexual attraction.

They would be very similar programs algorithms-wise, information content-wise. You do notice that you literally said that saying the same thing in another language is to fundamentally say a completely unrelated thing?

Programing language and there is a difference between copying code and copying a design. The how that design is achieved can vary completely between programmers and their prefered languages.

The only relation we currently know for certain between man and Loroi is in the design of the outward appearance.

And cognition. And behaviour. Parts that actually matter to the subject.

1. All that depends on biological factors. 2. We don't know that yet. 3. At least their cognition and behaviour must be drastically different from a humans thanks to telepathy.

A similarity that so far seems to be limited to Caucasians

Wah?

Let's not get into politics, but the closest fit to all Loroi seen up to now is Caucasian. In any case, the Caucasoid look came about sometime in the past 70.000 years, after the Soia were long gone. So the very close outward similarity between the Loroi and humans wasn't nearly as close when the Soia created the Loroi. We need to take the original separation into account when discussing what traits man and Loroi likely share.

Yes, and it doesn't make any sense.

We could be looking at a weakness that only comes into play after prolonged exposure to telepathy. We'll know more in a few pages. Soon, Arioch, right?

Different in makeup, not in function. "Their legs are blue - therefore they are probably not for walking".

That's only a tiny part of biochemistry. The differences between human and Loroi are not just skin colour, but everything about their bodies. It has to, or they wouldn't work very well at their temperature. When everything is different from the grounds-up, we need to be very careful about postulating similarities.

[Werra]

Usage of high heels has a determinate effect of altering the wearer's gait to a significant degree in a quite certain and measurable manner:

Attractiveness is an issue of aesthetics (and it's highly subjective); it's not what I would call a practical use. Loroi mating is pre-arranged; attractiveness doesn't factor into it.

It turns out day planners and post-it notes will be mankinds sexiest contribution to the loroi economy.

Just wait until they meet German accountants. 15% of the Library of International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, the worlds largest collection of tax law literature, is German.

[Mk_C]

Here's to hoping that this thread doesn't get closed now. This is not just high heels and their hotness. This is inter-species social commonality in the context of technological artificial life creation and evolution, which is essentially the original topic extended to it's fundamental origin. Once again, fetishes have lead us to the meat of it. It can't be helped.

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It does, insofar as the traits the Loroi are endowed with, even the most basic, are not the result of human genetic information but instead given to them by the Soia.

The actual information is largely the same - that's what a template means. The language is different, and some of it's interfacing is necessarily different, and a tiny bit of functional content is - but the bulk of content that was reproduced using those remained largely unchanged. Loroi walk like humans, if using more efficient musculature. They breath like humans, if using a different oxygen transportation pigment. They bleed like humans, if blue. They bear and breastfeed their children like humans, if for shorter periods of time. They think like humans, if differently brought up ones. They laugh like humans - just so. And they probably love like humans, if a bit strangely.

None of this would ever be possible if the peculiarities of biochemistry dictated the entirety of function and content. They do, together with environment and random chance, in normal evolution, but we're pretty certain that vanilla blueberries are not naturally evolved, and I've already explained how and why the tiny little period of unsupervised existence they got to enjoy could not lead to any real evolutionary change. IRL, the possibility of something so similar emerging out of different environments and biochemistries is one of the greatest questions on the issue of existence of extraterrestrial life and intelligence, but we're placed in the context of the possibility being already proven possible, if through artificial means. There's no point in claiming behavioral divergence stemming from fundamental difference in biochemistry if we are already shown the extensive degree of convergence despite different blood coloration.

You're claiming that their outward similarity to humans translates to inward similarity of functions of biochemistry in detail.

Consider for a moment that while you say that inferring similarity from external shape to be a weak foundation for similarity of internal content, you're working entirely on the dissimilarity of biochemical internal shape when you're claiming the dissimilarity of internal content. You're essentially trying to explain how something with blue blood cannot think and feel the same way as something with red blood - which is fundamentally no different from the idea of something with one shape of skull being incapable of thinking and feeling like something with a different shape of skull. Those are both shapes, vessels, languages, signal systems. They are not the content, the function, the message, the signal. Both function and mean are important for the whole system, but we're explicitly focused on the issue of behaviour, of internal content, which is connected to the form but is not dictated by it - the message is realized through language, and for the most part none of Soia-Liron biochemistry has kept the Soia from realizing the content of original human information in it's full semantic meaning.

We once again have to return the the thought experiment with a digital copy of Werra. Tell us - would this simulated Werra be something completely, fundamentally, incomparably different from and alien to the original Werra by the virtue of being realized in a completely different fundamental form, or would he be a related and similar entity? Would it be possible for you to have the same preference of best girl in the main cast, and for the same reasons? I am not asking if you and him would be the same person - I'm asking if there would be a relation between you two, a commonality in essence. Since it is obvious that the languages of your expression would be fundamentally different - he wouldn't function on actual neural synapses firing and hormones triggering mediator expression cascades. This would mean that whatever would be common between you and the Digital Werra, would bee so due to you sharing the same information content, and despite a fundamental difference in language that expresses it.

We've seen an Umiak laugh on page as well.

Are we sure that the Stray was laughing? And aren't we kinda working on a setting-wide assumption that the war happened in no small degree due to Umiak thinking and feeling not like Humaniti and Loroi do?

Which tells us nothing about how much of telekinetics is instinctual.

Emotional trauma, as any other nurtured experience, cannot overwrite instincts. It can lead to them being utilized in a different way, rearranged by the shift in conscious and subconscious higher mental functioning. A (consciously or subconsciously) aware mind assigning new triggers for archeocerebral reactions, not changing those reactions. A traumatized veteran has new learned stimuli triggering the fight-or-flight response and reacts to the response according to his training, but the FoF itself functions the same as it did for a neolithic hunter-gatherer. That what makes trauma a trauma - it is not inherent, in is acquired, in a traumatic event. Thus, Fireblade's berserker state tells us nothing about psychokinesis' connection to non-conscious cerebral function. Neither does it matter that the trait is genetically-determined - our capacity for speech is also genetically-determined, yet it doesn't involve the basal ganglia much - we're not Chinese rooms to speak without actually thinking.

Not by itself. The way they smile is again just outward similarity in looks, not in function.

Look 'ere:

SpoilerShow

Now say

outward similarity in looks, not in function.

again! Say

outward similarity in looks, not in function.

again, I dare you, I double-dare you! Say

outward similarity in looks, not in function.

one more goddamn time! Work those mirror neurons, man, they all we can hang on as a communal form of life! And if we can't trust a nerdy little girl's smile - what can we ever trust? What contact can there ever happen? This would be assuming an impenetrable information exchange wall, where every possible meaning can be assigned to every possible signal without any resolution into a functional interpretation system, a galactic community that is one huge Vernam cipher without a decoder. The horror!

The hormonal reaction is a vital part of it. That's what makes it work. A sexual cerebral reaction to a stimulus is worthless if it doesn't tell the body about it.

Of course, but - we know that blue boytoys have no issue with signal going down the line once it is triggered, don't we?

I thought your whole point is that Loroi males will show a reaction to high heels?

We're kinda left it in the rear-view mirror, but - yes.

Isn't that exclusively about whether the trigger works the same way?

Yes, and this is what the points on neurophysiology of sexual attraction and information transfer between replicator systems concern. What's downstream of the trigger doesn't concern us as long as it works.

That Loroi males are interested in sex in general can't be taken as confirmation of specific attractions by itself.

Yes, since that would concern the specific trigger, as it is addressed.

Genetics is a bit more complicated than that. Genes can have very different effects depending on the environment they're in. Biochemistry is hugely important for that environment.

Of course. This is why we know that Loroi replicator and expression systems are different - but we're concerned with how the expressed information is similar and made to imitate the original to a close degree. Please, try and hear me, as I try to hear you, though however had I try I fail to see how epigenetics would be relevant given the, you know, already assumed different replicator.

The spark plug from the Sherman in your example could become the cigarette lighter in the biplane, if warmachines were genetics.

Why would it? We're talking about the function of one of the fundamental elements of cerebral system. Those are conservative as fuck. The COX1 has a shitton of differences in it's intron content between different species, but the functional elements are virtually identical in you, me and a potted ficus. Both evolution and genetic engineering can be extremely surprising and unintuitive, but they are never intentionally nonsensical.

Problem is, you can't just take one type of hormone, replace it along with the whole accompanying biochemistry and then expect the same results. You'd definitely need to change up how things work to arrive at the same result.

So, we're back to prolactin not working for Loroi cellular receptors in mammary glands, and thus them being incapable of lactation?

Well, actually, gene expression is also dependent on what other genes there are. So a bottleneck that reduces genetic variance within the population can very well produce new forms.

Good, we got do the gene interaction. Now, did you consider that the different interaction combinations would already be present in the variance before the bottleneck? And that the bottleneck itself has no means of introducing those combinations into the population on it's own? We're removing elements, not adding them, you can't get more combinatoric outcomes by removing elements. You're still missing the concept of variance being the material of evolution, with natural selection as the mechanism. The mechanism cannot provide the material.

For which 300.000 years is plenty of time, honestly.

If we were talking about an amoeba, perhaps...

While that is true in some aspects, evolution is the process of genetic change in a population.

No, not every every kind of change in a population's genepool is evolution.

That can happen extremely fast. A virus that wipes out every fat person in the next week, would change the genetic landscape of humanity practically overnight by severely cutting down genetic factors for obesity.

Yes, and it would cause a thin form to spawn out of nothing... no, wait, it wouldn't - said form already existed. We would experience a classic bottleneck event eliminating one of the forms - but it would still not introduce any new forms on it's own. Consider the original point.

The Bantu expansion saw the Bantu Y-Chromosomes replace most other African Y-Chromosomes.

What traits were lost or gained?

The Black Plaque changed European immune system so fundamentally that it is the suspected cause for an existing immunity to HIV within Europeans (around ~5% are strongly resistant, with less being immune, IIRC).

It's "Black Death".
And no, it factually did not change anything fundamental about the immune system - you and me both can still contract Yersinia pestis infection and die from it, it was not even a proper bottleneck event. And the hypothesis you are mentioning is extremely weak (as it contradicts... most concepts it interacts with, from the nature of the pathogen to the geographic distribution, to the nature of immunity). Even if it were genuine - it would explain how one population has a slightly higher occurrence of a trait that is also present in other populations. In other news - New Yorkers are fundamentally different from New Jerseyans because they have slightly more gingers.

What you are describing are examples of genetic drift. Very, very, very slight genetic drift. Most animal populations on Earth experience orders of magnitude more drift than this in much shorter periods - and the absolute majority of it still doesn't serve as evolution material. Early hominid populations experienced orders of magnitude more drift than that. What happens to us now is at the demarcation line of what can and can't be called evolution. And the same would be true of any species that develops a cultural civilisation.

Those aren't minor changes

How are those not minor changes, beyond your emotional perception of them as such?

and we're constantly gaining and losing genes.

Such as? Please make sure that the examples you present are indeed new (post-civilization origin) events.

That's not how it works.

Ironic.

Just because a gene could be in a global population doesn't mean it has to remain there.

Of course, it's just likely to do so.

Also, gene expression is as important as the genes itself

Important for what exactly? Remember the original point.

which is dependant on the concentration of other genes in the population

Frequency. The term you need is "allelic frequency".

So traits can easily get lost or even die out.

Your C does not follow from your A and B.

For example a gene that is beneficial within say the Dutch population can be downright harmful for Japanese, as the Japanese population does not have coevolved genes that negate negative effects of the gene in question. All it takes for a gene to die out is other, more beneficial genes claiming that slot, for selective pressure to reduce the genes presence.

Great example, Werra. But it assumes selection pressure being involved. As we have already covered, there is no reason to assume it.

Telepathy alone is so different from humans that it changes society completely.

I dunno. They still have property, classes, production relations, conflict of interests, hierarchies, art, interpersonal and inter-collective competition, cultural values, concepts of virtues and transgression in the social benefit and reward and punishment of individual according to those, et cetera. What matters is, the success and power over proceedings of information - cultural and genetic - is tied to individual's (largely circumstantial) capacity to internalize, understand, and muster the social code and social environment to the their own benefit. This involves a lot of circumstantial and social factors, but next to no genetics. Genes largely withdraw from the context. And for the genetic selection to fuck itself, it doesn't even have to really withdraw - it only has to allow a few cracks for bottleneck events to cease their function as bottlenecks. The first time a biped's femur was fixed with a splint and rest under community's care, the genetic evolution of said biped experienced a crash to desktop.

Which means all the societal selectors would be different. Those selectors were absolutely massive in humans in a relatively short timespan.

Yes. For different kinds of behaviour. Not for genetic traits outside of straight up lethal ones.

Telekinetics are iffy, as Arioch has stated that they depend on more than genetics alone, so I'm loathe to discuss them.

Fair point.

Sorry for being blunt, but that's not how it works.

It's alright - some bastardization of scientific concepts is inevitable as we're striving for their understanding.

They can't, because genes create their own environment. Consider that your own genes were already active in your parental generation to create the environment in which you grew up. Even if you were an orphan, your genes are already present in the rest of your people, who are responsible for the environment of your upbringing. There simply isn't any trait in humans that isn't affected by genes.

Do you really think that it is the genes that hard-determines what we do for a living and how we live on doing it, and not say, technology and mode of production? Because that would be a case for the vulgar social Darwinism. It's late XIX century variation, to be precise. I mean, without getting into the ugly-ugly and wholly unwelcome implications - please consider that Loroi are, as you claim, fundamentally different genetically, and yet they still exist as an industrial goddamn society.

In a given individual, half the genes will be from each parent, that is correct. But we're talking about population genetics.

Didn't I just explain how it would inevitably propagate in a population with an example of the Lucky Hundred, as this is the immediate consequence of the mode of reproduction

There the haplotypes don't have to be even between the sexes.

They have to - because that's what a haplotype is, and Loroi happen to be a diploid organism with a single cycle sexual reproduction and haplophase being limited to gametes.

If the Loroi have sex specific chromosomes, it's pretty much guaranteed that their haplotypes aren't evenly spread. It can be, for example, that Loroi males have an easier time passing on their genes and so there is less variance in haplotypes amongst females than in males. Or that the greater number of females also means that a greater variety of haplotypes exist among their population. If there aren't sex specific haplotypes, the whole point is moot.

Of course they have to have allosomes (they could have ONLY allosomes for all we know, but that would limit their variance even further, and kinda eliminate all the benefits of sexual reproduction - math is a harsh mistress), and of course the spread of alleles between haplotypes cannot be even, and they cannot have sex-specific autosomal haplotypes unless they lack autosomes, and the greater number of females also means that a greater variety of haplotypes among them is a given, I kinda thought all of the above would be absolutely obvious. I apologize. The whole point is - no matter the original spread, no matter the hypothetical difference in mutation rates, no matter the size of female part of population, no matter the crossingover rate: the variance will be severely limited by the number of males, through them inevitably being the only container for the half of variance that can be present in every next generation, and an extra quarter above that for the one that follows. Think about it - not with the intent of proving me wrong, but with the intent of understanding it (and then perhaps proving me wrong). We don't have to build a literal Punnett square for it to be clear, do we?

Every gene has trade-offs, even if it's just that an actually beneficial gene can't take up that slot.

I'm sorry, but that's really, really not how it works. What "place" are you talking about? A locus? A locus can have numerous allelic variants - and all of them are neither beneficial nor detrimental unless the trait is under selection. Most of your and mine genotypes are neutral traits that have no "beneficial" or "detrimental" variations. There are no benefits or trade-offs for different eye coloration, or nose shape, or dietary preference, or a few less or extra teeth, even to such supposedly vital traits as muscle mass or blood reserve volume. Civilization means that even people with diabetes have bigger factors to weather they'll manage to reproduce than said diabetes. And those parts of genome that concern the fundamental functionality of our organisms and are under (stabilizing) selection largely have either no functional allelic variance, or do happen to concern something like immune system or hereditary diseases and thus happens to have a functional variant and several (typically) dysfunctional ones.

Also, again, traits can easily get lost. "Civilization" doesn't stop that.

True - as I said, it only makes the event extremely less likely. Specifically through most of genetic selection taking a long-ass hike.

You construct behavioural congruence from outside similarity.

Convergence. The word is "convergence".

Even if we were talking about two species of dogs that methodology would see you laughed out of the room.

Why, exactly?

The content had to be changed to work at a lower body temperature.

Got milk?

This means nothing . "Pathway of effects" is just verbal noise.

If only you knew, man.

If the environment changes, gene expression can also change. Biochemistry is the environment, so even if Loroi had 100% identical genes to humans, their genes would express differently.

You still don't understand that to "template-copy" humans in a different biochemical language, the Soia would, of course, have to create a different replicator (and thus inevitably a genome "from scratch"), a different metabolism and different signal systems, working on said different biochemistry, and that this point is implicit. You're arguing against the point where we're not in a disagreement. The point of contention is - Soia have used the different metabolic pathways, different enzymes and different hormones to assemble structures with the original functionality. Original information content, even if the language is different.

as a different pathway is a different effect.

Wouldn't this be at odds with the fact that we know at least three main and widespread different ways to oxidize glucose to pyruvate and the same energy value of reduction equivalents, at least six main variations for making carbon dioxide, water and photonic radiation into glucose, and there are significantly over a hundred individual pathways in your and mine bodies that activate the each of the same old four JAK-STAT cascades.

Irrelevant point, as I've never claimed that the Soia did not endow the Loroi with similar traits to humans,

So you agree that they recreated the majority of semantic information content?

Surely it's prudent to treat macro-scale physical functions such as lactation different to specific molecular reactions such as effects of high heels on sexual attraction.

Ain't this a bit arbitrary? Especially considering that cognition and sexual attraction are, in fact, more of macro-scale processes than than lactation.

Programming language and there is a difference between copying code and copying a design.

But a programming language is, in fact, a language. A a structured signal system for communication of semantics. You are still saying that to say the same thing in a different language is to say an absolutely different thing.

and there is a difference between copying code and copying a design.

Naturally there is a difference - but there is also a similarity, as the content of what is being copied is reproduced in either case.

The how that design is achieved can vary completely between programmers and their prefered languages.

But the semantic meaning, transferring which into a machine is what programming is, of the design still will be expressed in the same algorithmic logic. Consider, that very different HLL scripts can be assembled into the same machine code.

1. All that depends on biological factors.

Now this is actual information noise.

2. We don't know that yet. 3. At least their cognition and behaviour must be drastically different from a humans thanks to telepathy.

We know a plenty already. And we know that it is, in fact, much more similar than it is different. Should we post more laughing Beryl? Scared Beryl? Agitated Beryl? Curious Beryl? Beryl applying deductive reasoning?

Let's not get into politics, but the closest fit to all Loroi seen up to now is Caucasian.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah?

We'll know more in a few pages. Soon, Arioch, right?

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we need to be very careful about postulating similarities.

Yet we observe those at every point in the relevant area, don't we?

Are you on Hālian's discord server? I feel it could be much more productive over voice, and I'd bet nobody else reads our textwalls anyhow.

[Ithekro]

If we assume the Soia copied homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago and genetically designed a copy using their own brand of biochemistry, they did alterations. Or their biochemistry did that for them as a side effect. This we don't know. The Loroi don't even know. The Historians might know, but aren't telling. However how does a genetic sex determining factor result in a 10% male and 90% female population via breeding only (no government or environmental conditions that dictate one over the other for artificial reasons, if possibly practical reasons)?

The Loroi would have experienced some genetic drift based on planet of origin and the species being separated for several millennia. Humanity encounters the Loroi less than two millennia after they have reestablished their combined civilization, so the reintegration of their drift had only gone on for that long. More time than the humans have had since we have only recently gotten all the various drifted groups back into contact with each other (post-1492) for the most part, and even then political and racial boundaries have humanity as rather diverse for a single species. At least those that we not wiped out by disease or war during the re-connecting process. Not as diverse as say dogs, but you know.

However, it would be quite some time before human scientists would be allowed to study the Loroi and Soia to unravel these questions. And the answers to those questions likely won't change the outcome of the war. Human spacers will potentially get more intimate knowledge of Loroi anatomy sooner. Assuming an alliance happens. On the other hand, it could be a human brothel for wary Loroi warrior's to unwind far, far from home, while on the outer sector's campaign (Sol Sector), that delves into said exploration.

The question overall (outside of the lingering sexual tension of segments of the audience) is just what can humanity provide the Loroi to help them win the war? Aside from just Alex. Or will they even win the war? We assume the Loroi will win due to the author's choice of perspective by giving us Alex and the Loroi. Should this not be the case, the story would probably be served by a pace increase to get to the Umiak side of things....but since that seems unlikely (both pacing and getting a full on Umiak perspective) the Loroi Union and Humanity is what we have to work with. Humanity being completely outclassed save in terms of location and freshness. Technologically, humans should not be able to pull a rabbit out of their hat that does much for the war effort. With assistance, they could generate a new force to assist in the war effort, but distance and time. The Loroi appear to be on the losing side at the moment, given the sudden offensive. So what edge, context change, or perspective does Alex, or the existence of Humanity provide that can tip the balance of the war in the Loroi Union's favor? Because the Umiak just got some form of Farseeer negating edge that's making the war go badly at this moment.

[Werra]

The actual information is largely the same - that's what a template means.

No, it's not largely the same. It's different, from the grounds up. Even if the genetic information were a straight up copy of human genes, the environment, that is the biochemistry is totally different. That radically changes gene expression.

The language is different, and some of it's interfacing is necessarily different, and a tiny bit of functional content is - but the bulk of content that was reproduced using those remained largely unchanged.

You're unaware how much of a humans personality is gnees, instinct, hormones and environmental factors. You just can not say about an alien species that they're largely the same as us. Any similarity, especially those that are not macro scale bodily function needs to be shown. Until then you can't assume anything or your methodology is dishonest.

I've already explained how and why the tiny little period of unsupervised existence they got to enjoy could not lead to any real evolutionary change.

Your explanation was false. Sorry that I have to be so blunt. 300.000 years is not a short period in evolution. Evolution can work extremely fast, depending on the selectors. Just look at modern man. In the ~70.000 since our ancestors split from the African population, humanity has reached FST distances between some of its populations, further than between some species. Which is an interesting side note, but not necessary at all to show how your explanation is invalid. Even tiny genetic changes can have huge effects. At the risk of repeating myself, the Loroi genome must have been reworked from the ground up just to get them to work at their body temperature. That's a huge change and every genetic change has related changes elsewhere in the genome.

There's no point in claiming behavioral divergence stemming from fundamental difference in biochemistry if we are already shown the extensive degree of convergence despite different blood coloration.

The extensive convergence we've been "shown" is that the Loroi are alive, mobile, sapient and have the same senses we do (plus one more). That's...not a high bar. Every alien species in Outsider is reaching that.

You're essentially trying to explain how something with blue blood cannot think and feel the same way as something with red blood

You got me wrong. I'm saying that we can't assume a congruent instinctual reaction in an alien species without having seen it.

- which is fundamentally no different from the idea of something with one shape of skull being incapable of thinking and feeling like something with a different shape of skull.

Funny thing, those racist scientists that measured skulls to find outward signs of ability and character of a person? Modern scientists still do it, just directly on the brain, via brain scans. Phrenology has basically made a silent return. Ask yourself this, based on what do anthropologists make their claims about the growing intelligence of our hominid ancestors? Skull shape.

Those are both shapes, vessels, languages, signal systems. They are not the content, the function, the message, the signal. Both function and mean are important for the whole system, but we're explicitly focused on the issue of behaviour, of internal content, which is connected to the form but is not dictated by it - the message is realized through language, and for the most part none of Soia-Liron biochemistry has kept the Soia from realizing the content of original human information in it's full semantic meaning.

A bodily Reaction to a stimulus must be dictated by the physical peculiarities of the organs reacting to it. In other words, biochemistry is decisive in how a body reacts to the stimulus of high heels. The biochemistry between Loroi and humans is very different. Whatever difference between the signal and the signal system you try to construct falls flat, since one can't be without the other and we know for a fact that the Lorois system must be different to ours on the molecular level.

Are we sure that the Stray was laughing?

The hiss indicates intensity of feeling, and the chitter indicates approval (the closest Umiak equivalent to a smile; a repeated chitter is something across between applause and laughter).

Sounds like Tikitik laughed with Stillstorm. At the very least we know that the Umiak do laugh.

And aren't we kinda working on a setting-wide assumption that the war happened in no small degree due to Umiak thinking and feeling not like Humaniti and Loroi do?

Meaningless, as no war ever would have happened if the waring parties weren't of different minds about something.

one more goddamn time! Work those mirror neurons

Oh wow, a member of a social species expressed happieness at succesful social contact. You think my dog wagging its tail happily when I come home means it thinks like a human? The Loroi do look a lot like us, which means that their physical range of expression will overlap with ours to a large degree. You however see this and base very fine behavioural similarities on that outward similarity.

Of course, but - we know that blue boytoys have no issue with signal going down the line once it is triggered, don't we?

We know that they can pass sexual signals down the line. That tells us nothing about whether the signal that's caused by high heels gets passed on, does the same as in humans or whether it is there at all.

Yes, and this is what the points on neurophysiology of sexual attraction and information transfer between replicator systems concern. What's downstream of the trigger doesn't concern us as long as it works.

No, the trigger may work, but the reaction to it can be a different one. So what actually happens is absolutely vital.

Please, try and hear me, as I try to hear you, though however had I try I fail to see how epigenetics would be relevant given the, you know, already assumed different replicator.

I'm trying to show you that the base assumption must be neutrality on the subject of similarities as long as they aren't shown. Since even if our genes were a perfect copy of theirs, the gene expression would still be different. So the genes that cause a reaction to high heels in us may very well not have that effect in Loroi.

the functional elements are virtually identical in you, me and a potted ficus. Both evolution and genetic engineering can be extremely surprising and unintuitive, but they are never intentionally nonsensical.

That's because you, the ficus and me all share the same genetic language. Which we apparently do not with the Loroi. So yeah...

So, we're back to prolactin not working for Loroi cellular receptors in mammary glands, and thus them being incapable of lactation?

No, we are not. Obviously the Soia were able to engineer lactation into the Loroi. But that's a trait they got to work for them deliberately. What you need to show is that the Soia created the Loroi with a reaction to the stimulus of high heels that is congruent to the human one. Just because the Loroi were given one trait, doesn't mean they got another.

Good, we got do the gene interaction. Now, did you consider that the different interaction combinations would already be present in the variance before the bottleneck? And that the bottleneck itself has no means of introducing those combinations into the population on it's own? We're removing elements, not adding them, you can't get more combinatoric outcomes by removing elements. You're still missing the concept of variance being the material of evolution, with natural selection as the mechanism. The mechanism cannot provide the material.

A change in rate of gene occurence is evolution. Whether new genes appear or just old ones vanish is irrelevant for the result on the species. If you want to argue that the Loroi did not undergo genetic drift from their human contemporaries in those 300.000 years, then this is still not a big deal. As the Loroi evolved at a minimum new skin colours and because humans in that timespan had plenty of evolution happen to them. Complete with new traits.

What traits were lost or gained [in the Bantu expansion]?

Just whatever information was on the now extinct or significantly diminished Y-Chromosomes of the conquered people.

What you are describing are examples of genetic drift. Very, very, very slight genetic drift. Most animal populations on Earth experience orders of magnitude more drift than this in much shorter periods - and the absolute majority of it still doesn't serve as evolution material. Early hominid populations experienced orders of magnitude more drift than that. What happens to us now is at the demarcation line of what can and can't be called evolution. And the same would be true of any species that develops a cultural civilisation.

What a disingenious attempt at wordplay you are making here. Genetic drift being different from evolution. When genes change in a population, that is evolution. Whether new ones appear or old ones vanish is irrelevant for evolution happening. Genes also don't have to vanish completely for this, as if their percentage of occurence gets less, that just means they're currently in the process of vanishing.

Such as? Please make sure that the examples you present are indeed new (post-civilization origin) events.

I don't agree to keep your arbitrary line of pre- and post civilization. The very idea is questionable, as you proclaim that the Aztec civilization didn't have other selectors than the Greek, Roman or Chinese one. That's an untenable position. You don't even accept that civilization can apply its own selectors.
If you want an example of how civilization can apply very strong selective pressure, I can heartily recommend you "Against the Grain" by James Scott. In one chapter he describes his hypothesis that the shift from semi-sedentary hunter-gatherer to fully sedentary agriculturalist subjected humanity to strong new selectors in the shape of disease, infections, parasites amongst others. According to Scott it took mankind 5.000 years to overcome those difficulties and to continue it's formerly steady growth.

Great example, Werra. But it assumes selection pressure being involved. As we have already covered, there is no reason to assume it.

We can be certain that other selective pressures applied to various human populations. You aren't trying to claim that African tribesmen or nomads on the Asiatic steppe were subject to the selective pressure of having to operate within the Roman judicial system, are you? Oh yes, that too is a selective pressure.

[An] individual's capacity to internalize, understand, and muster the social code and social environment [...] involves [...]next to no genetics.

The genetic heritability of intelligence in humans is thought to be between 50 and 80%. But even if mental ability is only 10% genetic, that still means that the individuals with those genetic traits will over time do better. If that genetic advantage translates only into a 1% reproductive advantage and is being carried by 10% of the population, we'd still be looking at the replacement of those not advantaged within centuries. Or thereabouts. It happened in humans. How do you think we evolved our intelligence?

]The first time a biped's femur was fixed with a splint and rest under community's care, the genetic evolution of said biped experienced a crash to desktop.

What? The genes that enable that bipeds population to apply splints and medical care will still be evolving. Not to mention that even with medical care available, it's still an evolutionary advantage to not be needing that care in the first place.

Do you really think that it is the genes that hard-determines what we do for a living and how we live on doing it, and not say, technology and mode of production? Because that would be a case for the vulgar social Darwinism. It's late XIX century variation, to be precise. I mean, without getting into the ugly-ugly and wholly unwelcome implications - please consider that Loroi are, as you claim, fundamentally different genetically, and yet they still exist as an industrial goddamn society.

Yes! Because "your own genes were already active in your parental generation to create the environment in which you grew up." That genes have some effect is indisputable. Do you think chimpanzees could maintain our civilization if only they were brought up in the same environment as humans? Evidently not. But how did we get to possess the genes necessary for civilization, while our cousins did not? By a large number of individually small changes. That means the evolution of our intelligence is still ongoing, since nothing can stop such small changes from occuring.

Of course they have to have allosomes (they could have ONLY allosomes for all we know, but that would limit their variance even further, and kinda eliminate all the benefits of sexual reproduction - math is a harsh mistress), and of course the spread of alleles between haplotypes cannot be even, and they cannot have sex-specific autosomal haplotypes unless they lack autosomes, and the greater number of females also means that a greater variety of haplotypes among them is a given, I kinda thought all of the above would be absolutely obvious. I apologize. The whole point is - no matter the original spread, no matter the hypothetical difference in mutation rates, no matter the size of female part of population, no matter the crossingover rate: the variance will be severely limited by the number of males, through them inevitably being the only container for the half of variance that can be present in every next generation, and an extra quarter above that for the one that follows. Think about it - not with the intent of proving me wrong, but with the intent of understanding it (and then perhaps proving me wrong). We don't have to build a literal Punnett square for it to be clear, do we?

That's still not true, as the female part can still carry a larger share of the variance until population has grown enough for more men to be present. Because if a female has two daughters, statistically, she should have passed on her full set of genes. So whether or not there is a male that shares those genes with her, doesn't really limit the variance that is possible in the population.
But let's say that there is every haplogroup present in the male part of the population. Then their comparatively low number still does not have to mean a limitation to the variance of each generation. An individual can always only carry as many gene variances as its genome has slots for. Let's say there are 16 genes for eye colour in a species, of which a given individual can carry 4. So at a minimum you need 4 individuals to have the full set of 16 present in the population. In humans the minimum for a stable, longterm breeding population is considered to be 500 individuals of fertile age. That's plenty of space on the genome for many dozens of gene variations of a specific trait. I think it's a safe assumption that the early Loroi quickly surpassed the number of 500 individuals, even in their males and from then on had more than enough individuals that could carry gene variations. So the number of variance genes for a trait just needs to be lower than the number of individuals in the population to not limit the occurence of variation and therefore evolution.

I'm sorry, but that's really, really not how it works.

That's precisely how it works. If there are 16 genes for eye colour and a given individual can only carry 4, that means it can miss out on the genes that give them the most attractive eye colour. If you would have been born an Iranian woman with ice blue eyes, you'd know that eye colour can definitely make a difference in reproductive success. Just like muscle mass and the shape of the face. I got to check with you here, are you really saying that physical attractiveness has no effect on reproductive success? Shit, attractiveness even plays a part in your wages.

And those parts of genome that concern the fundamental functionality of our organisms and are under (stabilizing) selection largely have either no functional allelic variance, or do happen to concern something like immune system or hereditary diseases and thus happens to have a functional variant and several (typically) dysfunctional ones.

Do you think that the genes that control our digestion are under new selective pressures from modernities overabundance of certain food types? Would you say they're fundamental to the functionality of our organism?

Convergence. The word is "convergence".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/congruence
I'm not talking about convergent evolution here.

Why, exactly?

Because deriving similar behaviour from similar appearance is not proper methodology. Just because two dog breeds are brown doesn't mean both have the same level of intelligence or aggression levels.

The point of contention is - Soia have used the different metabolic pathways, different enzymes and different hormones to assemble structures with the original functionality. Original information content, even if the language is different.

That is simply unknown so far. We know very little about their tissue, much less their molecular makeup. We can not say that the Lorois brain structure is close to ours or that even if it is, functions the same way as ours. We definitely can make no qualified judgement on whether they share traits like a reaction to certain visual stimuli.

So you agree that they recreated the majority of semantic information content?

No, I don't agree with that at all. Again, you see outward similarity of form and large physical functions and start wagging your tail sure of further similarities of specifics. That's plain improper. Especially since we know that the specifics of the Loroi are quite different.

Ain't this a bit arbitrary? Especially considering that cognition and sexual attraction are, in fact, more of macro-scale processes than than lactation.

It is arbitrary, but you're talking about a very specific part of sexual attraction in humans. One for which we know of no pressing reason for why it should have been copied in function by the Soia. Lactation is kind of essential for procreation, which is the base function a species needs to fulfill. But attraction to high heels in specific can easily be done without.

But a programming language is, in fact, a language. A a structured signal system for communication of semantics. You are still saying that to say the same thing in a different language is to say an absolutely different thing.

A programming language is more like mathematics than a conversational one. If we were to take my example into the realm of spoken language, it would go like this. You see a book about philosophy in which the author comes to a certain conclusion. You like that conclusion and write your own argumentation for it, but go at it from a different angle. So the conclusion is the same, but the method by which it is reached is a different one.

Naturally there is a difference - but there is also a similarity, as the content of what is being copied is reproduced in either case.

No, what is copied is what the design can do, not necessarily how it does it. That copy also does not need to be perfectly mirror all functionality of the original design if the design goal is achieved otherwise.

Now this is actual information noise.

Cognitive ability depends on biological factors. I don't know how you can argue against that. Even behaviour, such as aggression is hugely affected by hormonal levels. Ok, you say the environment decides those hormone levels, but consider that our body reacts to the environment based on our genes. Same environment, different genes, another level of hormones.

Should we post more laughing Beryl? Scared Beryl? Agitated Beryl? Curious Beryl? Beryl applying deductive reasoning?

Oh wow, a social animal showing a range of emotions very likely common to all social animals. Dude, even the Historian construct has shown this similarity to humans by having a sense of humor (one which we can appreciate, even, unlike Beryls), sarcasm and even mimic like when it narrows its eyes, gesticulates or winks.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah?

Surely it isn't news to you that we can differentiate human races..or populations or subgroups or however you'd like to call it by the shape of their skeletons? Just point me to one Loroi with a non caucasian skull shape. I'm not saying they don't exist, but everyone we've seen so far most closely matches caucasian. And we've seen one from every one of the three sister worlds by now. Although, have we seen a Loroi from Deinar?

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Monday is the 31th this time around. The updates usually coincide with the patreon billing cycle. Might be until the 7th.

Edit: I think I may have written haplogroup when I meant type.

[Ithekro]

Thinking of Soia and Terran based genomes in mathematical terms, based on numerical systems. Terran genome program is in Base 10. Soia based genomes are in a Base 8 derivative (Trade 8). The aesthetic and functional results are very similar, but the details are quite different. Its the details that can mount up given more time to observe. Time which Alex (our eyes for the series) has not yet had. Since he's only been with the Loroi for, what a week. Eight days? He hasn't even been away from their military ships yet. Not stepped foot on a Loroi controlled planet, or seen any Loroi civilians or any males. So our view is limited on this subject by quite a lot since our source of information (outside sourcebook like materials) is one human ensign who has had limited contact with a few Loroi military personnel for eight days, with him only sort of being open about things for the last few hours on a shuttle with a small number of females.

[gaerzi]

and "sans-culottes" means what it literally means.

Not exactly due to semantic drift. In contemporary French, "culotte" means a type of underwear. But at the time of the French revolution, it designated breeches -- short pants that stop just below the knees, where they are fastened so as to hold the socks in place, as was the aristocratic fashion of the time. The sans-culottes were those who did not wear such things, but that doesn't mean that they went commando -- instead of breeches, they wore trousers. (What they often did not have were socks. Without socks you need long-legged trousers so as not to reveal your lower legs, with socks you can wear breeches instead.)

From there the meaning has gradually shifted to designate any sort of knee-length trousers, such as those that were part of schoolboy uniform for a while (like the knickerbockers), and then shifted again to designate underwear (just like in English, the words "pants" (US) or "knickers" (UK) have also moved from outerwear to underwear).

the Library of International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, the worlds largest collection of tax law literature

When Hell one day will invade to extinguish the human species, this will be the place of the first portal.

[Mk_C]

No, it's not largely the same. It's different, from the grounds up. Even if the genetic information were a straight up copy of human genes, the environment, that is the biochemistry is totally different. That radically changes gene expression.

Now we're just being repetitive. We know that Loroi metagenome cannot be a literal copy of Humaniti metagenome - it's impossible given different replicators. We also know that while it is not a copy, it is a functional translation, "a similar structure made with a different brick set", as Arioch described it. The information content I'm referring to is this functional similarity - the sequences are of course different, the enzymes are different, the reactions they catalyse are different, the cells are different, but the structures assembled from those cells are different, the same blueprint adjusted to use different material. The blueprint is the common information.

You're unaware how much of a humans personality is genes, instinct, hormones and environmental factors

You might have noticed that the starter of this entire argument was me referring to a quirk of human sexual behaviour specifically being instinctive, as was suggested by recent research - that's the whole crux. So I believe we are both very much aware that the entire bedrock of a sapient species' behaviour, and there's no real disagreement here. It is likely that you are projecting the typical disagreements you face on the Internet onto me. There's no need for it - I take in and attentively consider your arguments, without jumping to conclusions based on my preconceptions, so attaching theses preconceptions to me (or to you) is pointless.

You just can not say about an alien species that they're largely the same as us. Any similarity, especially those that are not macro scale bodily function needs to be shown.

We already know that they had to assemble every function from scratch, improving most of those in the process. But pretty much every function aside from sanzai and psychokinesis essentially repeats a human function. Even when concerning functions that would be entirely useless for their performance as space warfare thralls. Functions such as feminine features and lactating mammaries (seeing as they originated as a part of an already advanced civilization, and the reproductive SOP is early C-section and artificial nutrition) for simpler structures - and humor, appreciation of beauty, empathy, fear and even sarcasm for more complex structures, despite such functions being rather explicitly detrimental to a warrior species. Instead of deciding "And They Shall Know No Fear, and no empathy either (preventing all sorts of nasty emotional debacles like the type with Stillstorm)", they simply remembered the principle of "if it ain't broken don't fix it" and followed the template. This means that it is at least as baseless to assume an absence of neurophysiologically-determined behavioural similarity as to assume it's absence. I admit my bias it preferring to assume it for the lewds, though. But your assumption of absence is still an assumption just like that, and what even is the bias that drives you to it?

300.000 years is not a short period in evolution.

For higher mammals with a generation of at least 10 years - it's extraordinarily short.

Evolution can work extremely fast, depending on the selectors.

You're still ignoring the issue of evolution requiring material as well as mechanism. Variance AND selection. It doesn't happen on selection alone, no matter how hard. It can't - it's mathematically impossible. How do I explain this...

Consider a set of natural integers from 1 to 100. This is our "evolving population". We want it to exist (not end up empty of members), and we want it to evolve (to obtain new characteristics that describe it, but could not be used to describe the earlier set). We can apply selection and exclude all the odd integers from the set - and we'll have a half of the original set, with nothing new added. We can apply selection again and exclude every other number along ascending count - and we'll still end up with just a fraction of original set, with all the new characteristics of this set being absences of characteristics that the original possessed. There's is nothing new that this set can do that the original couldn't, no matter the selectors. It's not evolution - there is absolutely nothing new emerging in the process, and there is no selection that this new set could pass while retaining any values that the original set couldn't also pass. But if we supply a source of variance - like having random selections of integers in the original set multiplied by each other and the product being included in the set - the set will gain new members and new characteristics previously absent. This new set would include stuff like members with values > 100. We could apply a new kind of selector - like "remove all members with values <101", and while the older sets would be excluded entirely, the newest set would retain some members, while being a product of the earlier set and yet not including it as a subset. It is a product of a earlier set, yet it does not include it, and it possesses entirely new characteristics. Evolution happened. Now, we could apply a different selector - like "retain all primes and exclude everything else", but no matter how many multiplication permutations we did, this newly-evolved new set will be excluded entirely - every member we have is a multiplication product, and thus not a prime. We have reached the limit of what this kind of variance can provide - the selector ins question cover it's entire range. It doesn't matter how many multiplications we run, or how many other selectors we apply, we would still not be able to pass the "primes only" selector. Evolution is not going to happen. What we need is a different kind of variance - like, not just multiplying the values, but also adding some of them up and including the sum into the set. That way, we will end up with some members that have prime values, and can pass the primes only" selector. We could do it with the original set, couldn't do it with the multiplied set, and now we can do it without including a single member of the original set. While what we have is an eventual product of the original set, it possesses many of the original set's characteristics and more, without including the original set. It's a product of the original set's evolution, and it would be impossible to obtain this kind of set only by applying selectors. Variance is required, and the more variance you have in both it's magnitude and different approaches, the more you can obtain of new from the old. The selection merely defines it as it's own distinct new, that can in turn change and evolve independently of it's origins.

And our point is how assuming a faithful recreation of the template (a necessary base for your evolution argument to have any meaning), 300000 years would hardly be enough to produce sufficient variance for significantly different limbic system structures, even in humans. More so for Loroi, with longer generations and longevity inevitably playing a role in mutation rate. More so in one of the most conservative regions of the cerebral system. For what you describe to emerge would be like replacing the differential on a car in 0,005 seconds while it drives at 100 km/h.

Just look at modern man. In the ~70.000 since our ancestors split from the African population, humanity has reached FST distances between some of its populations, further than between some species.

But mein haplofuhrer, there are some little issues with this statement:
1. Wright's Fst has next to nothing to do with evolutionary distance. It's a measure of how much a given pair of individuals (or sets of individuals) fits the model of a perfect singular population maintaining a panmixia. It's entirely possible that say, you and me posses a mutual pairwise Fst of 1, due to lacking any common ancestors within the last 100000 years or so and thus not presenting a case of the population consisting of two of us to being an example of panmixia. But that wouldn't make us into members of different species, does it?
2. "Further (Fst distance) than between some species" is a self-contradictory statement. There cannot be a "further (FST distance) than between some species" because the FST between different species by definition equals 1, which is the maximum pairwise Fst. Because two species are not a singular population. If they are, or even can be a singular population hypothetically - then they are not different species. Nobody cancelled Mayr's and Simpson's criteria yet, and those postulate that if this and this freely interbreeds with viable offspring (the former criterion) or is not evolutionary isolated from one another (the latter criterion), then it's one and the same species. There are, indeed, false species still present in the taxonomic systems, due to molecular phylogeny happening relatively recently and taking a massive dump all over the pre-existing taxa, but we know those species to be just that - false, and thus there is no any milestones of distance to be find within those. Comparing pairwise Fst of a human population with those only serves to clear a bar lying on the floor.

This is what happens when metrics are used without their proper understanding. Fortunately, we have resolved this problem through explanation and understanding. Go, friend, and misapply F-statistics no more.

I also can't help but notice that you've entirely ignored the Digital Werra thought experiment. Why?

Even tiny genetic changes can have huge effects.

Or not.

The extensive convergence we've been "shown" is that the Loroi are alive, mobile, sapient and have the same senses we do (plus one more). That's...not a high bar. Every alien species in Outsider is reaching that.

Show me a Neridi that you'd love to be your waifu and which would possibly itself love to be your waifu.

You got me wrong. I'm saying that we can't assume a congruent instinctual reaction in an alien species without having seen it.

We can, but we shouldn't. We shouldn't assume it's absence either, though.

Funny thing

Skip!

A bodily Reaction to a stimulus must be dictated by the physical peculiarities of the organs reacting to it. In other words, biochemistry is decisive in how a body reacts to the stimulus of high heels.

That would mean that Loroi boys react "peculiarly" to all sorts of sexual stimuli. Which is not the case.

Sounds like Tikitik laughed with Stillstorm.

Huh. I didn't know that. Thank you.

At the very least we know that the Umiak do laugh.

Not as humans do, and not at jokes.

Meaningless, as no war ever would have happened if the waring parties weren't of different minds about something.

I'd say most of them happened with the warring parties being of exactly the same mind about most things. "X is rightful Wanklandian clay" and "X is rightful Jerkoffian clay" are not examples of different minds about something. It's both instances of singular "this clay is mine!"

For the Union and Hierarchy though, we have the implication of a collective inferiority complex inherent to the Umiak social consciousness, which could've acted as one of the motivators.

Oh wow, a member of a social species expressed happieness at succesful social contact

But you specifically stated:

The way they smile is again just outward similarity in looks, not in function.

Now you admit similarity in function?

You think my dog wagging its tail happily when I come home means it thinks like a human?

Dogs don't smile in a recognizably human way.

That tells us nothing about whether the signal that's caused by high heels gets passed on, does the same as in humans or whether it is there at all. ... the trigger may work, but the reaction to it can be a different one.

Why? This would imply a dysfunctional reaction to all sorts of visual stimuli, but we know this to not be the case.

I'm trying to show you that the base assumption must be neutrality on the subject of similarities as long as they aren't shown.

You're not assuming neutrality though. You are trying to explain how this would be impossible due to, disappointingly enough, biochemical barrier - while the whole premise is a good bulk of our functional genetic information crossing it no problem.

But that's a trait they got to work for them deliberately

"Deliberately" as in "they had to rework this function in a new language" - yes, this is true of everything about them. "Deliberately" as in "they knowingly pursued this function, and not just kept it from the template"? Two questions:
1. How do you know that?
2. Why?

Just because the Loroi were given one trait, doesn't mean they got another.

Of course - it just makes it quite likely.

A change in rate of gene occurence is evolution.

No, nyet, nein, nahin, nie, non, nai, jok, tidak, yo'q.

Redistribution of allelic frequencies can play a role in the evolution. But it can also not do anything like that. Not every occurrence of genetic drift contributes to how the evolution unfolds. And it most certainly cannot function as a material for evolution, as it does not provide variance - it merely sometimes determines the peculiarities of how this or that selection can apply to this or that population. More frequently it doesn't, though.

Consider a hypothetical species of a crocodile, Crocodylus experimentalis. Say it exists as a stable singular population somewhere in the swamps of Central Africa. One third of it's population has a genetically determined speckling of reddish scales on it's belly, another third - a similar speckling but brown, and the last third - bright green. This is a totally neutral factor, and as such it is not under selection - it is merely subject to, as you've called it "a change in rate of gene occurrence" due to random factors. Due to all sorts of random occurrences, a million years down the line "a change in rate of gene occurrence" occurred - 8/10 of the population now have brown-speckled bellies, while the other two variants are down to 1/10. Fast-forward another million years - 8/10 of Crocodylus experimentalis now have green-speckled bellies, while the others are down to 10%. Another million years - 8/10 reddish ones and minorities of others. Yet another million years - and once more we have 1/3 with some reddish scales on their bellies, 1/3 with brown and 1/3 with green. No other significant changes occurred in those millions of years - naturally, given it's the damn muck-smelling snout-smirking jaw-snapping crocodiles, they don't feel like evolving anywhere, they are /comfy/ in their niche and they maintain strict stabilizing selection everywhere it matters. Now, would you, Werra, say that in those millions of years, Crocodylus experimentalis has undergone an evolutionary change? As you have said yourself: "A change in rate of gene occurrence is evolution". A lot of change in rate of gene occurrence certainly happened for Crocodylus experimentalis, but given that - would you point out the evolutionary difference on the "before" and "after" pictures, and possibly do the honours of naming the new species?

What a disingenious attempt at wordplay you are making here. Genetic drift being different from evolution. When genes change in a population, that is evolution.

It is very much different from evolution.

evo·​lu·​tion | \ ˌe-və-ˈlü-shən
Noun: descent with modification from preexisting species : cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time leading to the appearance of new forms : the process by which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations

No different forms (or changes) emerge in the process of genetic drift. See the Crocodylus experimentalis thought experiment.
(a flawed definition, I know, but so far the only thing we all can really agree on is this OR a long list of what evolution really isn't. "Evolution is not genetic drift" being among them)

I don't agree to keep your arbitrary line of pre- and post civilization

Well, arbitrary or not - can you provide examples or not? It seems like this would be trivial if the processes you describe are indeed occurring, and on the scale which you describe.

The very idea is questionable, as you proclaim that the Aztec civilization didn't have other selectors than the Greek, Roman or Chinese one. That's an untenable position. You don't even accept that civilization can apply its own selectors.

Now, certainly, examples of functional alleles deliberately and efficiently vanishing or appearing de novo in the populations of those civilizations would certainly reinforce your claims, no? And the picture I present is certainly not untenable, unless we follow it up with a tremendous set of implications and look at those from an equally tremendous set of contradicting assumptions. But we don't have to do that.

If you want an example of how civilization can apply very strong selective pressure, I can heartily recommend you "Against the Grain" by James Scott.

Before considering a flawed interpretation of an original work by someone with zero authority in academic anthropology, perhaps there is some lighter reading in order, as to avoid further misunderstanding of academic science. PM me if you'd like to have the Russian edition free of charge - I don't know where you can find the English one for the same price, though.

selective pressure of having to operate within the Roman judicial system, are you?

Well, it would be entirely incorrect to claim that Roman judicial system applied any kind of genetic selection on the populace.

The genetic heritability of intelligence in humans is thought to be between 50 and 80%. But even if mental ability is only 10% genetic, that still means that the individuals with those genetic traits will over time do better.

Without diving into the hellscape of measurability of intelligence and IQ surveys flying around - that assumes high intelligence being a favourable trait in a society for reproductive success. We kinda know for certain that it is not. Or to go for a closer example - consider Tizik-tik and Hal-tik.

If that genetic advantage translates only into a 1% reproductive advantage and is being carried by 10% of the population, we'd still be looking at the replacement of those not advantaged within centuries.

Firstly, we would not - that's not how applied selection works. I strongly recommend chapter... err, I think it was 26-27 of the above-linked book.
Secondly - as this is not how applied selection works, it contradicts the observed phenomena.

How do you think we evolved our intelligence?

Accidentally, of course. Opposable thumbs, remember?

What? The genes that enable that bipeds population to apply splints and medical care will still be evolving.

Which ones would that be? And how would the selection happen? I don't figure anyone with lower "genetic predisposition towards applying splints" going extinct because of it.

Not to mention that even with medical care available, it's still an evolutionary advantage to not be needing that care in the first place.

Hardly. The whole point of medical care is factors making it required no longer excluding their victim from the gene pool. Same with nearly every other significant piece of technology.

Yes! Because "your own genes were already active in your parental generation to create the environment in which you grew up."

I doubt that. I dare to consider that much more of the environment is determined by the state of technology of the society, it's practical application, and the cultural principles that follow from said application in social practice. I say, those determine infinitely more than even the most severe (of non-lethal) genetic factors.

Now, I know just the perfect example to illustrate this one: my own great-great-grandmother, old illiterate Kopachikha. She was a Poleshuk, born in raised in Poles'ye - the most isolated of the inhabited regions in Eastern Europe. And more specifically, a she was Poles'yan Bagnuk - a member of the most isolated and reclusive part of Poles'ye population, an actual literal swamp-dweller. We know the genetics of Poles'ye populace to be the most conservative among all Slavic populations - until early XX century, they didn't mix with any other group, they didn't evolve anywhere, they didn't experience any significant amount of genetic drift even - which can be expected, given that they were living in a very isolated region, under effectively unchanging environment. As far as we know, their way of life built around primitive agriculture and gathering remained almost completely unchanged since ancient proto-Slavs first settled the region in about V century AD all the way until the 1920s, as they and their swamps were largely undisturbed by Medieval knyazi, shlakhta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and ranked noble bureaucracy of the Russian Empire, "almost unchanged" as culture did change with little traces of what is forgotten - literacy was unknown there until the Soviet period, and oral tradition is incapable of true permanency. The genetic constancy, however, is one of the main reasons for why we can trace the ancestry of Slavic peoples to Poles'ye and no further - we can see where ancestral lines converge on Poleshuk line, but everything beyond is as murky and the region's swamps. This doesn't make it the true place of origin for Slavic peoples - only shows that it was settled from multiple sources and then served as the staging ground from which ancestors of various other Slavic groups migrated to the West, North and South (though it is much more complicated really, as Slavs have ceased to be a genetially homogenous group and became a number of fluid linguistic amalgamations of hundreds of genetic groups about a thousand years ago). So - the "genes [that] were already active in the parental generation to create the environment" remain a constant across over a thousand years. Now, my grand-grand-grandmother Kopachikha was born and grew up in this environment, under the same genetics as countless generations of her ancestors, and largely the same way of life. However, she managed to encounter one of the first Communist Party functionaries sent to Poles'ye to organize the proper integration of it's people into the newly-formed Belorussian SSR - swamps being drained, roads being laid down, schools being opened and industrial agriculture becoming the mode of life for locals, resettling from isolated bog settlements into larger villages. Kopachikha fell in love with that functionary, who obviously was my great-great-grandfather, and before he was killed in WWII while commanding a guerilla unit, they had children - many more of those than she would be able to feed gathering mushrooms and berries in the swamps, and more than could live through to adulthood without the help of early XX century medicine, despite it being a hard historic period of it's own. Her late husband, however, impressed the importance of education on her long before he died, and as she raised her host of children as a single mother, she managed to get every single one of them through school, and later university, the education eventually landing them and their own children jobs all across the Soviet sphere of influence, from Cuba in the Northwest, to Angola in the South, to Vietnam in the Southeast, and beyond the Polar Circle in the Russian North. By the time she died, her descendants counted almost a hundred and lived on every continent save Australia and Antarctica.

Well, seeing as genetic factor remained a constant, consider - could Kopachikha have made this kind of a reproductive success if she happened to be born in the VI century AD, with and among the same genes? Could she bear a similar amount of children, and then have them scattered across similar distances, to become parts of such a number of communities, had she been an Early Medieval Poleshuk, with the same Early Medieval genes she had in the XX century? Was this environment that she actually lived in decided by genetic factors, or rather the effect of science, education, technology and their implementation in society?

Of course, you might make an argument about scientific and technological progress themselves being determined by genetics of the people who conduct them - but should you do that, I must urge you not to stumble over your own arguments made in this very thread concerning the technological progress in different societies, and specifically the claims of it's universality as dictated by the universal laws of physics.

That's still not true, as the female part can still carry a larger share of the variance until population has grown enough for more men to be present

It is inevitable that the female part would carry a larger share of variance - because women are more numerous. Variance is produced in the origination of individuals (or rather, the proto-gametes that will produce them), and 9 out of 10 such events produce females. They will always carry most of the variance, but this variance would never exceed the bottleneck introduced by the drastically lower number of males, as most of newly acquired variance is lost in the inter-generational transfers I described.

Because if a female has two daughters, statistically, she should have passed on her full set of genes.

No, she would not. The coin does not remember it's previous flip. Just because she gave birth to a child that inherited one of her haplotypes for every given gene does not lower the chance of her next child inheriting the same haplotypes that were already propagated (and the others being lost). While having two daughters, a huge sample of Loroi females would transfer an average of 75% of their haplotypes. Males would have an average of 10 children each , and likely pass nearly 100% of their haplotypes (for them to dominate the genepool of the further generations), but those contain only a fraction of variety contained in females. But wait, there's more. The "2 daughters" you refer to are taken from human sexual ratio and what is necessary for it to achieve replacement rate. In Loroi, it would cause an exponential population explosion, as 900 females (and 100 males) would give rise to 1800 females (and 200 males) who would give rise to 3600 females (and 400 males) etc. We know that continuous exponential growth was not something that they enjoyed ever in their history, population growth being continuously controlled and happening slowly and gently on average in civilized period and experiencing wicked Waves of Life in the nomadic period and the Reign of Chaos. In actuality, the girls have to give birth to 1 daughter and 0.1 son each on average to achieve replacement rate and stability. Make it 1.2 children each for a slow and steady growth, giving us something around 55% percent for an average female to pass her full set. But wait, there's more! At least half of Loroi female population effectively almost doesn't reproduce, nor under the caste system, nor under any more violent systems that preceded them (consider only about 40% of viable males successfully reproducing in primitive Human societies, given they had way more access to the members of the opposite sex, an ancient Humaniti societies were downright nice and fluffy compared to Loroi ones). This means that at least a half of the variety produced or inherited by the female part of the population gets flushed down the drain, the births being used up to print the variably recombinant sets of a few female and a few male genotypes. Half those probabilities. But wait, there's more. Consider a female Loroi "passing on he full set of genes" - half of those genes are those of her father. Those of the tiny and thus less varied part of the population, those genes inevitably being omnipresent in the population already among her half-sisters. So if a random Loroi develops a neutral mutation in question, she only has 27,5% chance of passing it down to the next generation (assuming the chance being one of the fortunate warriors to be also random and, generously, 50%). About 7,5% chance of passing it down to her granddaughter. To propagate across the population, said trait has to be inherited by several descendants - and we're down on <0,1% chances. Now, the traits emerged in males would propagate like wildfire - but males experience only about 1/10 of variance that females do, by the power of sheer numbers. Even if a Loroi develops a favourable mutation under direct selection, the only significant chance of it spreading across the population is for her to have a son. Otherwise the mutation is most likely to be lost.

And writing up all of that is still quicker than drawing a Punnet square that somebody would not be able to dismiss on arbitrary reasons. Loroi are great for retaining the traits that they already possess, and awful for developing new ones. Which is pretty much what I would want in a population of warrior thralls that I already designed to my preference and whom I don't want to change into something different when/if I'm not looking. That, of course, before considering that they are unlikely to really change into anything at all while they maintain civilization.

But let's say that there is every haplogroup present in the male part of the population.

Can't be - there's only so much options you can stuff into 1/10 of the population. And the whole point has to do with the loss emerging, not propagating. In any case - lets say as you do.

Then their comparatively low number still does not have to mean a limitation to the variance of each generation.

It does - "every haplogroup present in the male part of the population" is about 1/10 of what can be present in the female part of the population.

An individual can always only carry as many gene variances as its genome has slots for.

Two. That would be two. You are thinking of alleles and loci. Loroi would have two alleles per locus. They are a species with diploid genomes and single-cycle dioecious sexual reproduction limiting haplophase to gametes. Even if they were not
diploid and say tetraploid, they would just inherit linked half-tetrads from each parent, so effectively the same. To have more "slots", Loroi would need to have more parents per child, or a different cycle.

Let's say there are 16 genes for eye colour in a species, of which a given individual can carry 4

Are you talking about genes or alleles? You need chapter 24 of Green, Stout and Taylor if the distinction is not clear. In case you do mean alleles - as I said, two "slots". And most genes have way, way, way, way ,WAY more than two allele variations. Go figure. But consider for a moment, that you've just essentially claimed that you could stuff the entire current genetic diversity of mankind into 500 individuals. Russian Ministry of Defence called, they want to know your information packaging algorithms.

That's precisely how it works.

No, I explained it about beneficial and detrimental variations. And "slots".

f you would have been born an Iranian woman with ice blue eyes, you'd know that eye colour can definitely make a difference in reproductive success.

Eeeeeeh, possibly, but infinitely less difference compared to how many goats my father would own.

Just like muscle mass and the shape of the face. I got to check with you here, are you really saying that physical attractiveness has no effect on reproductive success?

It does, but an impressively minor one. You have to differentiate "getting laid" and "having tons of children".

Shit, attractiveness even plays a part in your wages.

Somewhat, in the relevant job fields (like services) and the unregulated employment - salary grids are a thing, you know. And with or without them, I fancy that education, skill, nepotism and general corruption play a much greater role than how good of a Tempo cosplay I could pull off, in a spherical vacuum of an average job.

Do you think that the genes that control our digestion are under new selective pressures from modernities overabundance of certain food types? Would you say they're fundamental to the functionality of our organism?

I say we alter our diet to fit our digestion system, rather than have our digestive system evolve under unfitting diet. Even if someone develops a trait - it would help them next to nothing, when billions of people worldwide achieve similar results by altering their behaviour rather than genotype. Remember that Japanese streamer girl, the one with unique metabolism that made her incapable of growing fatter, no matter how many dozens of cheeseburgers she eats? I don't remember her suddenly having scores of children. Now, Alya from Syria probably has about 6 children by age 24, and it doesn't matter much what her digestive system is adapted for - she's malnourished anyhow and would eat anything.

We know very little about their tissue, much less their molecular makeup. We can not say that the Lorois brain structure is close to ours or that even if it is, functions the same way as ours. We definitely can make no qualified judgement on whether they share traits like a reaction to certain visual stimuli.

No, I don't agree with that at all. Again, you see outward similarity of form and large physical functions and start wagging your tail sure of further similarities of specifics. That's plain improper. Especially since we know that the specifics of the Loroi are quite different.

I see your point and perspective, and it's strong points and robustness. The points you raise are strong and have good support. But I consider that it misses the important context of understanding form and function as they are and as they were used when Soia picked a template species. Thus, I'm asking you to see an alternative perspective, as it was outlined above.

It is arbitrary, but you're talking about a very specific part of sexual attraction in humans. One for which we know of no pressing reason for why it should have been copied in function by the Soia. Lactation is kind of essential for procreation, which is the base function a species needs to fulfill. But attraction to high heels in specific can easily be done without.

Lactation is not essential for Loroi. They were made by a space-faring civilization, to crew space ships. There's no reason for why early C-section and artificial nutrition was not the Plan A for Loroi child-rearing, as they are now - there are only reasons for why it would be so, until the Fall of Soia, which is unlikely to be something that Soia planned Loroi for. Thus, it is something Soia could do without in their thralls. Same with humor. Same with fear and empathy. And yet still...

A programming language is more like mathematics than a conversational one.

Not really, no. Programming languages are as much languages as natural languages are, and as mathematical languages are. Or artificial personal communication languages, or sign languages, or radio-communication languages, or DNA code language, or machine code language. They are all signal systems that encode sets of semantic meanings. They are no different for the purpose we are considering.

You see a book about philosophy in which the author comes to a certain conclusion. You like that conclusion and write your own argumentation for it, but go at it from a different angle. So the conclusion is the same, but the method by which it is reached is a different one.

See, I said you would understand!

No, what is copied is what the design can do, not necessarily how it does it.

Of course, but "what the design can do" is the actual meaningful information content, innit?

Cognitive ability depends on biological factors. I don't know how you can argue against that. Even behaviour, such as aggression is hugely affected by hormonal levels. Ok, you say the environment decides those hormone levels, but consider that our body reacts to the environment based on our genes. Same environment, different genes, another level of hormones.

What you say comes from sensible and truthful foundations, but it happens to develop into a gross oversimplification, and thus it's a vulgarization.

Oh wow, a social animal showing a range of emotions very likely common to all social animals.

Higher primates are the only social animals that use similar cues to us to show those emotions. And the way Loroi show AND experience those emotions seems to be infinitely closer to how humans do, rather than any social animals of Earth or other biospheres. Contrast Barsam, or Umiak.

Surely it isn't news to you that we can differentiate human races..or populations or subgroups or however you'd like to call it by the shape of their skeletons?

Yes and no. Most human population groups are not genetically-determined. The absolute majority of ethnic groups on Earth are linguistic or national ones, meaning that they can possess hundreds of distinct osseal phenotypes, or share said phenotype with a completely different ethnic group, or most commonly - both. You can't tell a Belgian from a Pas-de-Calais Frenchman by his bones, and you can't tell either from a Dutch. You can't do anything to declare a skeleton to be Russian, or Han, or Arab, or American - as those all happen to encompass the bloody majority of phenotypes present on this Earth, skeletal or otherwise. Now, you can take genetically extremely different groups, like say Yoruba and Aleut, and from the morphotypic markers of the skeleton we would be able to say that any given skeleton is more likely to belong to a Yoruba rather than a Aleut, but is it really Yoruba and not Igbo or Hausa? We kinda don't. Morphotypic markers are hella unreliable due to extent of homoplasy inherent to them.

I'm not saying they don't exist, but everyone we've seen so far most closely matches caucasian

Uuuuhhh, everyone we've seen so far has been a (fucking great) intentional distortion of humanoid features to create somewhat of an alien and elfin effect, which doesn't exactly match any existing human group, and then presented in only a semi-realistic style which blurs the distinctions further. The only thing we can do for any actual determination is straight up asking Arioch what references he used for what characters, if he even did and not worked from pure imagination under a heavy MoO2 overdose. And even if he tells us - how many of those do you think will have "anime" for ethnicity?

Although, have we seen a Loroi from Deinar?

Seeing as Seren is a (very recent as far as such processes go) colony and colony has to be colonized from somewhere, and

Tadan inhabited the central river valleys and are darker-skinned but also tall, and have a reputation for beauty

and

The largest number of modern Loroi with psychokinetic abilities can trace their ancestry to Deinar.

I think it's quite likely that Fireblade is a Tadan Deinarid by ancestry. She is one of the darkest and tallest and deliciousest ones we've seen so far.

Fuck me that felt great.

Not exactly due to semantic drift. In contemporary French, "culotte" means a type of underwear. But at the time of the French revolution, it designated breeches -- short pants that stop just below the knees, where they are fastened so as to hold the socks in place, as was the aristocratic fashion of the time. The sans-culottes were those who did not wear such things, but that doesn't mean that they went commando -- instead of breeches, they wore trousers. (What they often did not have were socks. Without socks you need long-legged trousers so as not to reveal your lower legs, with socks you can wear breeches instead.)

Certainly - I just pointed out how an entire social strata was designated by it's UNartistocratic style of apparel.

[Werra]

The information content I'm referring to is this functional similarity - the sequences are of course different, the enzymes are different, the reactions they catalyse are different, the cells are different, but the structures assembled from those cells are different, the same blueprint adjusted to use different material. The blueprint is the common information.

But the common information does not have to be the same, even if functionally both genetic codes achieve the same thing. Or appear to achieve the same. Take lactation for example. We know that Loroi do it, but we don't know whether their bodies achieve the process even remotely similar to ours. The Soia approach to bodily functions can be radically different even if it still arrives at a similar result. Thus, the genetic information can also be radically different.

But pretty much every function aside from sanzai and psychokinesis essentially repeats a human function. Even when concerning functions that would be entirely useless for their performance as space warfare thralls.

That's not something I can agree to. You ascert that Loroi express human functions. But those functions can be universal to sapient live and not specific to humans. Pretty much any social species will find use in body language, for example. Likewise social tools like expressing happiness, share joy, nervousnes will have an expression in all alien species that are remotely comparable to humans. You claim those functions to be human, when they could also be Soia characteristics or common to sapient life in general.

[T]hey originated as a part of an already advanced civilization, and the reproductive SOP is early C-section and artificial nutrition.

The ability to rear the young without industrial support is extremely valuable. With their overabundance of wombs and mammaries, the Loroi should also never be hard pressed for fertile women that can sit out a pregnancy or nannies to breastfeed. At least not in interstellar warfare, where the crews of starships are miniscule compared to the number of workers the industry needs to field them. So I don't think that the Loroi were planned with a general reliance for industrialy assisted births in mind.

for simpler structures - and humor, appreciation of beauty, empathy, fear and even sarcasm for more complex structures, despite such functions being rather explicitly detrimental to a warrior species.

Everything you've just listed is useful in some form or another for a species of space warfare thralls, if we assume that sapient thralls had to operate with a high degree of autonomy. If it's not directly useful for warfare, such as empathic individuals being capable of predicting the moves of opponents, then it likely is an inherent side effect of the degree of intelligence needed for a sapient species capable of staffing starships.

Instead of deciding "And They Shall Know No Fear, and no empathy either (preventing all sorts of nasty emotional debacles like the type with Stillstorm)", they simply remembered the principle of "if it ain't broken don't fix it" and followed the template.

We can only speculate at whatever design principles the Soia had in mind, but what you perceive as detriments to a warrior species can easily be an advantage somewhere else. Or the drawback we see is the downside to an otherwise beneficial effect, whose overall species wide positives outweigh the negatives in individuals. An example for something like that in humans would be some of the genes associated with homosexuality also apparently increasing the promiscuity of women carrying them. Which means that women and their daughters with those genes have a higher chance for more children, while their sons get shafted.

This means that it is at least as baseless to assume an absence of neurophysiologically-determined behavioural similarity as to assume it's absence. I admit my bias it preferring to assume it for the lewds, though. But your assumption of absence is still an assumption just like that, and what even is the bias that drives you to it?

I'm advocating to not assume a traits existence that hasn't been shown. This means also showing care with traits that are not immediately apparent. We are dealing with alien life here. You wouldn't expect that owls can learn words just because parrots can either. And those two species are far closer genetically than humans and Loroi.

For higher mammals with a generation of at least 10 years - it's extraordinarily short.

We're circling the drain here, but that's really not a short amount of time. Just compare the differences in dog breeds which have been achieved in less than a tenth of that timespan. Or in horsebreeding, which have been domesticated for less time than dogs and who take longer to reach sexual maturity. Or the physiological differences in humans, which I've shown you a picture for and which took ~70.000 years, a fourth of the time the Loroi had.

You're still ignoring the issue of evolution requiring material as well as mechanism. Variance AND selection. It doesn't happen on selection alone, no matter how hard. It can't - it's mathematically impossible. How do I explain this...

A species can evolve without forming new traits. Let me give you a real life example. In England there is a moth species. Some members are brown, some white. When the English factories coloured most trees in the south of the island white with sooth, the brown members of the species nearly vanished. Thus, a selector was applied which enabled the white moths to outbreed their brown counterparts. That is evolution and it happened without the moth species developing a new genetic trait. The process of evolution does not necessarily require new traits to appear. Just selective pressure to effect a change in the population.

And our point is how assuming a faithful recreation of the template (a necessary base for your evolution argument to have any meaning)

No, for an argument for evolution, a faithful recreation of the template is not at all necessary. Evolution happens, no matter how faithful the recreation is.

2. "Further (Fst distance) than between some species" is a self-contradictory statement. There cannot be a "further (FST distance) than between some species" because the FST between different species by definition equals 1, which is the maximum pairwise Fst. Because two species are not a singular population. If they are, or even can be a singular population hypothetically - then they are not different species.

Mayrs definition is not undisputed amongst a lot of biologists.Which means that yes, it's completely valid to measure an FST distance between some species.
Speciation does not need a huge number of changes either. Fun question. Are tigers and lions a different species? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger They're even fertile. Different species being able to have fertile offspring isn't that rare in nature.

This is what happens when metrics are used without their proper understanding. Fortunately, we have resolved this problem through explanation and understanding. Go, friend, and misapply F-statistics no more.

At least you're confident.

I also can't help but notice that you've entirely ignored the Digital Werra thought experiment. Why?

I've already given you my answer. A perfect copy is me or it's not perfect. An imperfect copy is another personality (construct), with its similarity to me decreasing by each passing moment.

Show me a Neridi that you'd love to be your waifu and which would possibly itself love to be your waifu.

You shoul/d/ know better than to claim convergence based on sexual attraction.

You got me wrong. I'm saying that we can't assume a congruent instinctual reaction in an alien species without having seen it.

We can, but we shouldn't. We shouldn't assume it's absence either, though.

Yeah, I'm not advocating for that either. But the trait still needs to be shown to exist before we should consider it as existing.

Skip!

Knew I'd get you with that.

A bodily reaction to a stimulus must be dictated by the physical peculiarities of the organs reacting to it. In other words, biochemistry is decisive in how a body reacts to the stimulus of high heels.

That would mean that Loroi boys react "peculiarly" to all sorts of sexual stimuli. Which is not the case.

A general principle does not follow from a specific case. Just because Loroi males don't have to react like a human male to one stimulus doesn't mean they necessarily react differently to all other stimuli. Besides, we don't know yet how they react. Could be that they do react peculiarly.

Not as humans do, and not at jokes.

Have you just called people with a weird laugh or sense of humour non human? Also, the Umiak write "Have a nice day" on their torpedoes, as far as I remember. Seems like a joke. Weird nitpick of yours.

For the Union and Hierarchy though, we have the implication of a collective inferiority complex inherent to the Umiak social consciousness, which could've acted as one of the motivators.

That's totally unheard of in human history.

Oh wow, a member of a social species expressed happieness at succesful social contact

But you specifically stated:

The way they smile is again just outward similarity in looks, not in function.

Now you admit similarity in function?

I'm saying that the function "friendly body language" is not specific to humans, but general to all social (sapient) animals.

Dogs don't smile in a recognizably human way.

Yet we can still tell their mood. So the function of expressing joy is not specific to humans.

Why? This would imply a dysfunctional reaction to all sorts of visual stimuli, but we know this to not be the case.

Well, maybe the Loroi do react to visual stimuli in ways you wouldn't expect from a human. We also know very little so far. What we have seen was controlled behaviour, since the Loroi know they're interacting with an alien and are aware that behaviour can differ. It's why Beryl spent nearly all the way to the bridge going over essentials with Alex. She even was so openminded that she seriously considered Alex to be territorial. Which kind of implies she wouldn't have been surprised to see Alex driven by instincts that Loroi don't share at all.

"Deliberately" as in "they had to rework this function in a new language" - yes, this is true of everything about them. "Deliberately" as in "they knowingly pursued this function, and not just kept it from the template"? Two questions:
1. How do you know that?
2. Why?

Because if you create a species after an inspiration, you obviously need to know what the genetic code does you're making your species out of. In detail or they would have been seeing all manner of negative side effects. Which means for Loroi to share an attraction to high heels, the Soia had to recreate that peculiarity of human genetics in their creation. Therefore, a deliberate effort would have gone into this trait.

[Genetic drift] is very much different from evolution.

evo·​lu·​tion | \ ˌe-və-ˈlü-shən
Noun: descent with modification from preexisting species : cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time leading to the appearance of new forms : the process by which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations

At least give the link. Then read "1b" and 2a". Now answer me this. If two traits are 50/50 in a species and one trait starts becoming dominant, going up to 80/20, is that evolution? If it isn't, because both traits are still present, then you are saying that evolution can only happen if either entirely new traits appear or old ones die off entirely. That's obviously not the case, as the drift of genes is how traits die off. That is quite literally, the process by which evolution eliminates genes that are selected against. It doesn't magically become evolution only once genocide has been achieved.

Well, arbitrary or not - can you provide examples or not? It seems like this would be trivial if the processes you describe are indeed occurring, and on the scale which you describe.

Yes, I can provide examples. The spread of lactose tolerance for one. Surely agriculturalists that have founded permanent settlements fulfill your definition of civilization. That tolerance was introduced afterwards and significantly reduced lactose intolerance in the European population. Now, you might say that the trait lactose intolerance is still present within mankind and while that is true, the European population underwent evolution in that regard.

Before considering a flawed interpretation of an original work by someone with zero authority in academic anthropology, perhaps there is some lighter reading in order, as to avoid further misunderstanding of academic science.

1.You don't need academic credentials to be correct. 2.My interpretation of Scotts book is not flawed in this point. He makes it pretty clear. 3.I'm not taking literature recommendations from somebody who doesn't understand that siblings get a different set of genes from each parent, every time.

Well, it would be entirely incorrect to claim that Roman judicial system applied any kind of genetic selection on the populace.

You're good with words and witty. Quite frankly I don't believe that you don't see how Roman lawfulness did result in other selectors than Germanic barbarians were under. In Rome for example it was possible for a large part of the population to earn its pay as thinking men, be that lawyers, engineers or scribes. The Germanic tribes offered very little such opportunities, thus Roman society was more helpful to the reproductive success of those with the genetic predisposition to these jobs. Not to mention the effect reliable peace-keeping/policing must have had on society, as it significantly decreased the need for aggression in individuals by externalizing it to specialists.

Without diving into the hellscape of measurability of intelligence and IQ surveys flying around - that assumes high intelligence being a favourable trait in a society for reproductive success. We kinda know for certain that it is not. Or to go for a closer example - consider Tizik-tik and Hal-tik.

That doesn't change anything about the point I made. Obviously intelligence was at one point hugely important to humans, or we wouldn't have so much of it. If IQ is not beneficial to reproduction and another trait is, then this other trait will be selected for. It's still evolution happening right this instance in post-civilization humanity.
As for the hellscape. Ask yourself this. Can you tell smart men from idiots? Obviously cognitive ability can be tested for. Besides, the g factor is so well sourced that no expert in a relevant field doubts its predictive validity.

Firstly, we would not - that's not how applied selection works. I strongly recommend chapter... err, I think it was 26-27 of the above-linked book.
Secondly - as this is not how applied selection works, it contradicts the observed phenomena.

If a trait increases the reproductive success of individuals carrying it, it will do better than its competition and spread throughout the population. Which means that the other, less beneficial loci will vanish in time. If several traits work in conjunction to increase reproductive success, then all of these traits will spread and outcompete their competition. You are aware that even within a species, the individual genes compete against each other by cooperating to create best-fit individuals that then breed these genes into the next generation? Competition implies losers.

How do you think we evolved our intelligence?

Accidentally, of course. Opposable thumbs, remember?

Ok, that's a plausible starting point. But how did we get from average 80IQ to average 100? Once we were somewhat more intelligent than our ape cousins, intelligence was still being selected for. There is no magical cut-off point at which the brain stops evolving.

Which ones would that be? And how would the selection happen? I don't figure anyone with lower "genetic predisposition towards applying splints" going extinct because of it.

Well, the genes that give those bipeds the ability to apply splints, for one. There should still be a selective pressure for applying improved splints better as that would mean an advantage against the smoothbrains with their primitive splints. I really don't understand why you insist on civilization neutralizing evolution so much. It makes no sense at all.

Hardly. The whole point of medical care is factors making it required no longer excluding their victim from the gene pool. Same with nearly every other significant piece of technology.

We've got technology and schooling to help the deaf. Yet the deaf are still being disadvantaged in the reproductive competition against the non deaf. Even if it's only that the descendants of the non deaf don't have to spend time and resources on taking care of a disability to even the field.

Yes! Because "your own genes were already active in your parental generation to create the environment in which you grew up."

I doubt that. I dare to consider that much more of the environment is determined by the state of technology of the society, it's practical application, and the cultural principles that follow from said application in social practice. I say, those determine infinitely more than even the most severe (of non-lethal) genetic factors.

Well, no. As the state of society depends on the genes of the population. A population that is genetically more inclined to be cooperative will see less physical strife within it. The amount by which genes influence society doesn't really matter. If it's as low as 10%, that would still see a selection for beneficial genes over time. All the degree of influence does is change how severely those genes will be selected for. Nobody credible estimates an influence of genes under 30%.

Well, seeing as genetic factor remained a constant, consider - could Kopachikha have made this kind of a reproductive success if she happened to be born in the VI century AD, with and among the same genes? Could she bear a similar amount of children, and then have them scattered across similar distances, to become parts of such a number of communities, had she been an Early Medieval Poleshuk, with the same Early Medieval genes she had in the XX century? Was this environment that she actually lived in decided by genetic factors, or rather the effect of science, education, technology and their implementation in society?

Yeah, well, obviously the civilizatory attainment of mankind depends on a lot of factors not directly related to intelligence. Yet the genes that enable us to have these societies are the necessary foundation that has to be there for other factors to begin to work. So in a way, the science and education was made possible by the genes. Without them, no amount of education could create modern society.

Of course, you might make an argument about scientific and technological progress themselves being determined by genetics of the people who conduct them -

Alright, you got me.

but should you do that, I must urge you not to stumble over your own arguments made in this very thread concerning the technological progress in different societies, and specifically the claims of it's universality as dictated by the universal laws of physics.

I never claimed that technological progress is universal to different societies. Just that the laws of physics upon which technological progress is based are universal. Which means that a universal understanding of say gravity is possible.

It will always carry most of the variance, but this variance would never exceed the bottleneck introduced by the drastically lower number of males, as most of newly acquired variance is lost in the inter-generational transfers I described.

A person can have more than one child. Not every child gets the same genes from their parents. Which means that a single person can (theoretically) pass on all their genes to the next generation. Thus, variance is not bottlenecked by a low number of males.

Loroi are great for retaining the traits that they already possess, and awful for developing new ones.

Not really. You have to consider that genes can also be passed on by relatives carrying the same genes. So even if every single Loroi at the time of their creation had a completely different set of genes, the succesful ones would quickly multiply after a few generations of very intense competition. As for your calculation that results in a single gene being passed on to the grandchild generation only at a very low chance, that's the kind of chance evolution constantly takes. You also fail to take into account that particularly succesful genes will be at a big advantage compared to the competition. So the Loroi carrying those genes might have a dozen or more children. Especially in a martial species, warlords and other elite fighters will see an inordinate amount of success. You're essentially arguing that the two first generations are dicy for a new gene. Yet the Loroi have a lot of advantages to help new genes along. For one, every succesful female has one or two centuries to breed. Loroi are also very healthy and a social species, which means low numbers of infant mortality. They also quickly reach the age of maturity, meaning beneficial genes can give their reproductive advantages more frequently. There is also the chance that the gene spreads to a male. One in twenty, from which point the gene likely gets quickly multiplied into the hundreds.

Can't be - there's only so much options you can stuff into 1/10 of the population. And the whole point has to do with the loss emerging, not propagating.

Can be. Genes are constantly competing against each other. The more gene variations there are, the fiercer the competition. Btw, 500 individual humans are considered enough to form a stable breeding population. As in, the rate of genetic change occuring in 500 people is enough to offset inbreeding. You also massively overestimate the number of different genes that code for a specific trait. A lot of traits hinge on less than twenty genes. Even if we take a trait like intelligence, which is estimated to have several hundred genes affecting it, that many genes can comfortably fit into several hundred people. The Loroi would also have quickly increased their numbers once the eco-system permitted it. Thus solving their bottleneck issue.

It does - "every haplogroup present in the male part of the population" is about 1/10 of what can be present in the female part of the population.

Females can have more than one daughter. For the spread of their genes it doesn't really matter whether there are a thousand or 10 males available.

But consider for a moment, that you've just essentially claimed that you could stuff the entire current genetic diversity of mankind into 500 individuals. Russian Ministry of Defence called, they want to know your information packaging algorithms.

It doesn't really matter for the rate of change whether the Lorois starting genes were diverse or limited, if your argument is that they're similar to humans in genetics. Rate of change in both Loroi and humans taken together is the deciding factor in how far removed they will be after 300.000 years.

It does, but an impressively minor one. You have to differentiate "getting laid" and "having tons of children".

Is this again about how civilization supposedly stops evolution? You're likely the only person on the planet that thinks being hot doesn't aid you inhaving lots of children. Good looks help you in almost everything you do in life, including acquiring wealth in goats or dollars. They definitely help you to find a partner with good genes themselves, increasing the potential quality of your offspring.

I say we alter our diet to fit our digestion system, rather than have our digestive system evolve under unfitting diet. Even if someone develops a trait - it would help them next to nothing, when billions of people worldwide achieve similar results by altering their behaviour rather than genotype. [...]Now, Alya from Syria probably has about 6 children by age 24, and it doesn't matter much what her digestive system is adapted for - she's malnourished anyhow and would eat anything.

The capacity to alter our diet is dependent on genetic factors. If only because those genetic factors have a huge influence on our available means. Even if the influence is small, it's still there and thus affects genetic change over time.
Btw, malnourished women don't have a lot of healthy children. They usually get them when they're not malnourished.

But I consider that it misses the important context of understanding form and function as they are and as they were used when Soia picked a template species.

I understand your position. But you simply make the mistake to see broad similarities in form and function and conclude from those the existence of very specific similarities of function. That's improper.

There's no reason for why early C-section and artificial nutrition was not the Plan A for Loroi child-rearing, as they are now - there are only reasons for why it would be so, until the Fall of Soia, which is unlikely to be something that Soia planned Loroi for.

Then why can Loroi have uncomplicated live births and lactate? If the Soia wanted to, they could have cloned all their Loroi thralls. Yet they gave them a fully functional, autonomous reproductive system that doesn't even require a lot of medical oversight. Evidently they weren't planned as a species that had to rely on C-sections and artificial breast milk. So, we know that early Loroi were able to naturally rear their young. We know absolutely nothing about whether they commonly had artificial childbirths.

You see a book about philosophy in which the author comes to a certain conclusion. You like that conclusion and write your own argumentation for it, but go at it from a different angle. So the conclusion is the same, but the method by which it is reached is a different one.

See, I said you would understand!

Ok, this example however proves how the informational content can be wildly different, even if it achieves the same goal.

Cognitive ability depends on biological factors. I don't know how you can argue against that. Even behaviour, such as aggression is hugely affected by hormonal levels. Ok, you say the environment decides those hormone levels, but consider that our body reacts to the environment based on our genes. Same environment, different genes, another level of hormones.

What you say comes from sensible and truthful foundations, but it happens to develop into a gross oversimplification, and thus it's a vulgarization.

Oh, just wait until I had three beers.

Higher primates are the only social animals that use similar cues to us to show those emotions. And the way Loroi show AND experience those emotions seems to be infinitely closer to how humans do, rather than any social animals of Earth or other biospheres. Contrast Barsam, or Umiak.

We don't know how Loroi experience their emotions. Considering the Big 5 Personality traits, at a minimum I'd expect them to be far lower in trait neuroticism, since they need to be in control for their telepathy. Their millenia long eugenics program to produce warriors should also have increased their trait conscientiousness. Their sexual urges also express themselves quite differently than ours. A female Loroi should be surprisingly close to a human male in behaviour, as society expects a lot of her what ours would expect from a male. Who knows, seeing a woman in dagger heels might cause an instinctive negative reaction in Loroi, as a female putting herself into such impractical footwear signals her poor abilities as a warrior.

Yes and no. Most human population groups are not genetically-determined. The absolute majority of ethnic groups Earth are linguistic or national ones, meaning that they can possess hundreds of distinct osseal phenotypes, or share said phenotype with a completely different ethnic group, or most commonly - both.

You're right that skeletons often can be tricky to identify definitely. Yet there are ways they differentiate even then. More variatione within populations than inbetween doesn't make it impossible to tell populations apart from each other.
You are wrong however on the rest. We can definitely tell human population groups apart from each other. We can, afterall pinpoint to a very high degree of precision the genetic and thus geographic background of a person. Compare.
Edit: That image hoster apparently has cropped the image down to unusability. Here, this should be the proper version.

Uuuuhhh, everyone we've seen so far has been a (fucking great) intentional distortion of humanoid features to create somewhat of an alien and elfin effect, which doesn't exactly match any existing human group, and then presented in only a semi-realistic style which blurs the distinctions further.

Just use your eyes. Btw, if we agree that Loroi look similar in large part to the comics art style, then that massively lessens the outward similarity between us and them.

[spacewhale]

I like how there's a huge blurb on genetics and differential xenopsychology, when the real question is who will Alex be spooning with when he wakes up.

[Krulle]

What's up with "Derailing in progress"? Is that some Admin setting?

I changed my posts title, because I knew it's not really relating to the original subject of the thread.

[Krulle]

Attractiveness is an issue of aesthetics (and it's highly subjective); it's not what I would call a practical use. Loroi mating is pre-arranged; attractiveness doesn't factor into it.

It turns out day planners and post-it notes will be mankinds sexiest contribution to the loroi economy.

Just wait until they meet German accountants. 15% of the Library of International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, the worlds largest collection of tax law literature, is German.

And that's only so low because they disregard most publications as either too specific, or already covering the same as other publications do.
Half of the worldwide publications (by sheer numbers) regarding tax laws seem to be related to German taxes. (In 2005 there was a statistic published by the German tax office that showed 50,02% of all wolrdwide publications regarding tax laws, the German tax office considers to be related to German tax law, albeit indirectly (e.g. regarding tax treaties between DE and other countries). - the German tax office did count software to fill in tax forms as publications too, which was the main reason the publication numbers got slanted so badly)
I think by now the numbers dropped a little, mainly because the Chinese tax law got more complicated and started producing more papers related to that, and to Chinese tax treaties with neighbouring countries.

Oh, they're talking so much about making tax declarations simpler in Germany, but they're always trying to make the big throw.
Which inevitably fails due to political compromises.
The Dutch did it the right way, small steps towards simplification. Step by step they achieved a rather simple system. Which at the same time also allowed better prediction of tax incomes, allowing the law makers earlier and better informed decisions of when to increase or decrease taxes.
By now I do my (Dutch) taxes in one afternoon, despite being a special case (expat with some tax exemptions, but not the full diplomatic range).
In Germany I was a standard case, and it took me nearly a month just to collect the papers, and at least three days to fill out the forms.

Also, I LOVED the old Dutch tax office slogan in their advertisements (yes, they advertise that you should do your tax declaration, and how much time you still have left to do it yourself, you get a bit more time if you let a professional file it for you):
"We can't make it cheaper, but we can make it easier".
Because this mentality is what a tax office should be: make it easy for you to file it correctly, it's not for them to make it cheaper, because that's set by the law makers.
The service mentality.
I think they're current slogan is "Leuker kunnen wij 't niet maken, wel makkelijker" ("we can't make it more fun, but easier") still transports the idea of service mindset towards the public, but fun was never part of tax filings anyway. And the previous slogan made clear they cannot influence the amount of taxes you have to pay.
They need to collect the money so the state can do it's tasks. (Although we have additional tax collectors, like the dyke construction organisations, where you also have to pay taxes, but this is not collected by the state tax office, but either directly, or by a joint tax collection organisation (usually joint with the municipality taxes).)

In fact, the central tax office programmed a software so simple and complete, that nearly all the software makers who made tax return software (for private persons) stopped developing their versions. (In Germany you have at least 5 bigger programs for private tax returns, plus plenty others, and that's before you start looking into specialised programs for professionals and companies, or modules for the professional uses ones (like modules to fill in the CN/DE tax treaty forms, or PL/DE, CH/DE, US/DE,...).)


Main disadvantage of the Dutch system: It's so easy, they require filing very early in the year. At a time my German bank is not even able to issue me my "bank statement for the year X", so I have to pull the numbers myself. This takes about 1 hour out of the 3 hours I need to do my tax filings. (Which I do at the same time for my wife.) Another half an hour is finding out my (forgotten) password for their website, as I only use it once or twice a year....

Edit to add:
The number published may also have been slated, because the German tax office had better access to publications by administration offices, who published a lot about special cases they had, or just articles about specific cases, which in the end had little to no value when trying to find out what you have to do yourself. A lot of those publications were academic, and according to the idea of "who writes, stays".
A little bit about the myth, alas in German:
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/servi ... 11192.html

[Mk_C]

Good G-d and heavens, I'll have to get home before I draft a proper response to that one.

when the real question is who will Alex be spooning with when he wakes up.

It's impossible for one to properly spoon a blueberry when 2 or more of them are forcefully and deliberately trying to privatize one's sides and limbs. As far as ownership over the territorial area of Captain Enzin Ristan and it's vast natural thermoenergetic resources goes, I believe it can end up divided between various claims under (the Historian's) neutral arbitrage, like Antarctica, with non-claimant parties likely conducting operations under their own jurisdiction regardless of claims, as it is customary for the Loroi. Hard to predict what the eventual political status of the pole will be, though. Now that is the real question.

[RedDwarfIV]

Going back to the original point of the thread...

Even if humanity could turn the Moon into a deathstar, that wouldn't affect the war. It could only defend Earth. It can't invade the Umiak, and it can't defend the Loroi.

The only way it could affect the war is by being such a drain on resources that the Loroi lose due to the logistics problems the project would cause.

[Werra]

If humanity makes an alliance with the Loroi, they could affect the war by being a drain on resources for the Umiak.

It might also be possible to volunteer human crews to the Umiak. If the Umiak supply humanity with some of their ships to make use of the human Lotai, all we need to do is smuggle some Loroi on board so that their Farseers see the fleet coming.
For the event of an Umiak escort, seeking to surprise the Loroi with higher numbers, a pre-arranged number of Loroi could code for the size of the fleet coming.

[boldilocks]

That seems like it would break all kinds of laws in regards to warfare and mark humanity as the kind of species you should probably wipe out rather than allow to exist and possible cause you all manner of problems in the future.

[Werra]

What an optimistic remark. Laws in a war of total annihilation.

I am assuming of course that the ruse is planned with the Loroi and so they know beforehand.

[boldilocks]

I suspect the Loroi would want the state of affairs to eventually return to pre-war status, which means they're now dealing with a species willing to forego the laws of war in order to inundate themselves with another species through subterfuge and war-crimes.
Not a great basis to begin serious diplomacy.

[Werra]

All the Loroi (or Umiak) need to do to trust us fully is to get us to rescind human shipbuilding capabilities in favor of buying theirs. With the technological advantages they have, all that requires is to force us to levy no import fees on ships of their make. They can ask for that in exchange of rather minor development aid.
Once we can't build our own ships anymore, the Mizol would have decades at a minimum to notice any sedentious thoughts amongst us.

That is ignoring all the control the aliens can get by placing their people in key positions during them uplifting us. Let's just hope the Empress doesn't set up rubber production on earth.