the problem with de-evolution
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 25 Apr 2001, 11:03
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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com> Subject: RE: (whorl) the problem with de-evolution Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:03:44 Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0725 at digest.urth.net> X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0725.shtml MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > If the inhumi all refuse to feast on human blood since they become > "good" from good humans,=20 A debatable premiss, but consider the result as if it were a given. > then their offspring would return to mindless animals. =20 Correct so far. > There is nothing to prevent the mindless animals that are the children > of good inhumi from sucking off of the people,=20 Also correct. But Horn does not say the secret will make the inhumi non-dangerous, only that it will make them no more dangerous than crocodiles.=20 > They would have no scruples, then their children would be intelligent. Intelligent, yes, but (_ex hypothesi_) benevolent. So you would have the "alternating generations" situation you suggest, but the threat=20 would be greatly reduced, as the dangerous inhumi would be the mindless animals. (As a side note, how many people are _actually_ attacked by alligators=20 and the like in a given year? I presume that proper precautions could=20 make the threat from non-sentient inhumi no greater than that from=20 crocodilians.) --Blattid *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/ *To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com *If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.= com
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