(urth) Rajan and Food

[David Stockhoff]

In diploidy, the number of genes is doubled. Sometimes the result is all-around greater viability, as with corn, and sometimes it is the opposite.

Either way, it doesn't mean doubling the limbs of animals---but then, if all life on Green and Blue is somehow plant-derived ... why not?

And of course diploidy is a metaphor for something here, and that possibility has been discussed.

***By the way, can you point me to the underwater greenhouses in the text? I may have missed them.

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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:11:49 -0400
From: "Brian Lovely" <brian at studiobl.com>
Subject: (urth) Rajan and Food
To: <urth at lists.urth.net>
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Well, whatever the Neighbors are to trees, the Inhumi are to vines.  Maybe
their base form is the slug-like thing that drops out of a tree on green,
kind of an amphibian that lays its eggs in water.  But if there base form is
just a vine, then feeding on something higher pulls them up from vine to
amphibian.  It's all up.  The uncrossed Inhumi are still vines, those who
have managed to move up a level are slugs, those who have fed on humans are
bat-winged devils.

Crossbreeding.  The corn that Horn seeks on the Whorl.  The underwater
greenhouses, the strange doubling of limbs that many creatures on Blue
exhibit.  I read somewhere in the list a theory about polyploidy something
or other--some biology that I don't know anything about--but the upshot was
that you can cross corn in such a way that the genetic pattern is
doubled...something like that.  More to the point, like beasts with eight
legs.  Who was crossbreeding who, and why?  Did the Neighbors have to change
themselves in order to survive?  Were the 8-legged animals experiments, to
perfect the technique? 



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