Mystery of Ascia/Agia

Gerry Quinn · 21 Jan 2011, 18:34 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:34:33 -0000
Subject: (urth) Mystery of Ascia/Agia
References: <AANLkTim+1KN+6tWRkW4gqaX_d=cLP-Ap_c3KZtoJXbSW at mail.gmail.com><9E5DCA03-6DA3-4F4E-9B5E-D7248A637A2B at butcherbaker.org>
	<4D393462.4040406 at io.com>
Message-ID: <C5D8F333AA3B4D8AA91FC58B64A783AB@jill>

From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
> On 1/20/2011 5:17 PM, Son of Witz wrote:
>> On Jan 20, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com
>>> But each country has (allegedly) a natural type to which the people
>>> living in it conform after twenty generations or so. So even if North
>>> Americans are descended from people who now live in Asia, they
>>> shouldn't look Asian.
>>>
>> Fair point.
>> I don't know anything about that biological theory. Sounds very
>> theoretical. I also wonder when that idea came into vogue. I don't
>> expect/require Hard SF rules for this sort of thing, personally.
>
> It is pointedly brought up within Sev's memoirs on one or two occasions. 
> It's essentialy a restatment that among a population the traits most 
> suited to their environment will come to dominate.

Unless variations are very small, the idea of a 'natural country type' 
conflicts with Dollo's Law which was discussed here a while ago.  Suppose a 
race evolves in Country A according to the 'natural' pattern, moves to 
Country B and after many generations adopts that country's natural type, and 
then moves back to Country A again.  If they go back to the original type, 
they are violating Dollo's Law.

What should happen according to Dollo's Law is that they will evolve traits 
suited to life in Country A, but those traits will not be the original 
traits.  A country cannot have a single unique natural type.

Suppose a tribe of Swedes moved to sub-Saharan Africa and lived an isolated 
existence for many generations.  They would probably develop a darker skin 
colour and other adaptations common to African peoples.. But they would 
never look like an African tribe who lived in the same place.

- Gerry Quinn

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net