Showing posts with label biology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biology. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Doctor is Human

I've thought about this before, and yesterday, I figured that I should blog about it. The Doctor, from the SF show Doctor Who?, is human.
"But wait," says everyone who knows anything about Doctor Who?, "The Doctor is a time lord." You are correct*, and the time lords are human. It seems most likely that the time lords are the result of the evolution of an isolated human population. They seem morphologically and physiologically so similar to humans that their arising completely independently of Earth's biology would have to occur astronomically improbably. And, of course, being evolved from humans means that they are humans.
Let's compare and contrast. On the one hand, time lords have two hearts** and can regenerate. On the other hand, time lords are bipedal plantigrade pentadactyl tetrapods with opposable thumbs, fingernails, two forward-facing color-vision eyes set in closed ocular orbits in skull-enclosed heads with hinged jaws bearing white, bony teeth, pink, fleshy tongues, and soft, pliable lips, altogether capable of speaking human languages, ostensibly with the assistance of vocal chords. They also ingest food through this forward-facing face-holes and apparently have taste buds, too. Time lords also have fleshy, dish-shaped ears on the sides of their heads, hair that grows out of the tops of their heads, along their eyebrows - and, by the way, eyebrows - and reduced or absent hair elsewhere. Also, time lords have skin in that variegated sepia range (dark brown to pale peach-ish) that humans have, as opposed to, say, green or orange. Oh, and time lords can be killed by untreated cyanide poisoning.

That's basically my argument for why the time lords are human. There are other things, but I haven't actually seen proof of them. For instance, I'm assuming that time lords have spinal chords enveloped in vertebrae, which would make them chordates and vertebrates, respectively, but I haven't actually gotten a look at The Doctor's back well enough to tell if there are vertebrae there, so I didn't list them above.
Anyway, if you see anything that I should have included in my lists, then leave a comment below, but, more importantly, if you see someplace where you think that I might be wrong, then leave a comment below.
That's all for now.

*as long as you didn't add a clause asserting that The Doctor is not human
**The fact that time lords have hearts is a similarity, by the way.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Sudden Short Story

I just came up with this idea. I'm not going to make this look nice. This is version 0.1 or something.

The Bimillennial Law, as it came to be known, was a peculiar thing. In 2103CE, it was noticed that life-extending technology was coming about so quickly that people just weren't going to die of old age anymore. It was realized that the overcrowding that this would cause could lead to great suffering, but it was hard to pick an age at which to put people down. 100 was clearly too early, since people had already lived several years past that 100 years ago. Some people thought that nobody should out-live Abraham, from Hebrew legend. Others used the age of Adam from the same mythos. Still others thought that nobody should live past 999, to limit ages to three digits - in decimal. Eventually, the age of 2000 was settled, being far enough away that nobody had to worry about it any time soon, and old enough that anyone who survived to it would have lived a satisfactory life, and could start to suffer from having to deal with just so many profound changes in a lifetime.
Later on - though well after the establishment of several extraterrestrial colonies - someone realized that this was stupid. The vote to repeal the Bimillenial Law was unanimous. Nobody was ever executed under this law.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Super-superregnum

I want to post this before I forget (and before someone else claims it). I think that we should preemptively add a "top" level to our classification/cladistics/phylogeny. It's tentatively a "super-superregnum" level, which puts lifeforms into entire biologies based on their planets (or other regions) of origin. I think that ours should be called "Terrus" because it sounds like "Terran" but "Terran" is already used descriptively in other ways, and because most of these end in "-us" or "-um".
I also hold that one super-superregnum (such as "Terrus") could in fact cover multiple planet, in cases of panspermia, whereby one planet's (or other region's) biology originates from another's.