{"id":3145,"date":"2016-01-11T16:51:45","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T21:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/?p=3145"},"modified":"2016-01-11T16:52:41","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T21:52:41","slug":"an-exercise-in-speculative-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/2016\/an-exercise-in-speculative-biology","title":{"rendered":"An Exercise in Speculative Biology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a fun exercise I’m doing. I invite you to do it, too! The intention here is push oneself to think in non-anthropocentric terms about what life might be like under other conditions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Body<\/a>
Four different structures, all from completely different environments<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
    \n
  1. Devise an evolutionary specification (that is, the way we do in fiction, where we need an alien to be a certain way, not the way it happens in nature, where successful reproduction is the only standard). Something like:\u00a0“The aliens I’m interested in can manipulate objects<\/strong>, sense objects<\/strong>, and\u00a0move<\/strong>.”<\/li>\n
  2. Consider a single structure \u2014 not a whole creature \u2014\u00a0\u00a0that evolved other solutions than we did to the more basic questions than we did, here on earth. Like, we evolved jaws from the gill structures on fish. Imagine if gill structures hadn’t evolved, or perhaps some other structure was more effective than primitive jaws, and so jaws never had a chance to take off.<\/li>\n
  3. What do those structures look like? How do they affect the lives of the creatures that grow them? If they have a culture, how do they affect their culture?<\/li>\n
  4. Leave it there! Design another structure for a different environment!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"Compressive<\/a>
    Nearly every muscle on Earth works through tension: pulling the levers of the limbs. These creatures have compressive muscles, which are badly inefficient unless they’re constrained like the cylinder of a piston. These critters use compressive muscles to slide along, and then to jump like a spider toward prey and away from predators.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Beautiful<\/a><\/p>\n

    These creatures use their feathery tendrils to smell an attractive, colonial microbe-infused rock, then detach the stalk. As they slurp their way through the surface of the rock, they grow a new stalk, which grows a new pod, which smells a new rock, and they continue. On this planet, there’s no clear distinction between plant and animal as there (usually) is on Earth; rather, motile structures evolved early on, and most life forms have at least a limited form of movement.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"This<\/a>
    This polypod evolved clusters of many types of nerves at the ends of its limbs. This type of limb evolved a temperature sensor that eventually began to sense electromagnetic radiation into the visible red end of the spectrum. The sensor is on the front of the thin, brittle transparent dome, while the back of the dome forms a mirror that focuses an image onto the sensor. The creature keeps its eyes safely tucked down until it needs to see a clear or distant image, pulls its eyes open, looks, and then puts them away again. They are so far the only creatures on their planet to evolve sight.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Trunk<\/a>
    These creatures have dozens of tiny, well-developed hands that they can use to manipulate objects. Lacking bones, they instead have rings of dense muscle that pull on slivers of cartilagenous material that can, themselves, change stiffness according to how strongly or gently the creature needs to grip. Each limb has its own tiny nerve cluster capable of complex stimulus\/response, which pass much simpler information back to a distant, central brain through a bus that co\u00f6rdinates the limbs together.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Here’s a fun exercise I’m doing. I invite you to do it, too! The intention here is push oneself to think in non-anthropocentric terms about what life might be like under other conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":3146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-xenoglyphs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3145"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3159,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3145\/revisions\/3159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}