(urth) interview questions

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/6/2011 8:25 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
>
>
>> Tony Ellis:  Then there is Dollo's Law. VRT cites it as an explanation for why he
>> cannot hold a pen properly. But Dollo's Law requires an organ to "degenerate through evolution"
>> - not something that happens over night. Whether you believe him or not, he is saying 'my ancestors
>> haven't used tools for millennia'.
>
>
> Ah..MAYBE NOW I get what Tony is getting at. Maybe.  If there was a long ago crash of a human starship
> on Ste. Anne, those humans (or maybe single human?) were imitated by Shadows. After a long period
> with no further source material, those imitated humans degenerated into Shadow Children (shrinking
> and losing their thumbs, becoming more shadow-like again I guess). Then when new waves of humans arrived,
> that's why Dollo's Law gets invoked. They have to re-establish the lost digit and its neural connections.
>
> It is difficult but not impossible to re-establish because Dollo's Law is more imperative on Darwinian
> evolution than Lamarckian.
>
> Sort of a blending of theories. Shadow Children USED to be close imitations of humans but degenerated
> back to half-Shadows after a long while. I think I can hang with that. 		 	   		

That sounds more reasonable to me, too; it parallels the acquisition of 
"hidden" astronomical knowledge by the Dogon people of Mali. After some 
early contacts, references to binary stars and planetary rings in the 
context of Neolithic technology take on the same presumed antique 
provenance. "How could they know without instruments?" was posed as 
early as 1949, and the 1966 popular book _INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE 
UNIVERSE_ by Shklovski and Sagan put the ancient ET meme in the pool 
available to Wolfe when he was writing "5HoC" et al.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >