human-centric aliens
Mar. 16th, 2012 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI mentioned the article about how Mass Effect is (according to the authors) brilliant SF world building a while back, and-- in the absence of actually having played the games, anyway-- I think they may largely be right. But having started to think about it, there's an aspect of this that's seriously beginning to bother me. Even in a game that's being lauded for having aliens that aren't a whole bunch of carbon copy humanoids, why are there non-human bipeds?? Not just why are they all bepeds, but why are there any others?
It's one of those weird human-centric fallacies: you occasionally see exhibits in paleontology museums where someone's built a humanoid lizard on the theory that this is what "might have happened if the dinosaurs hadn't died out." Um... if it didn't happen by the end of the Cretaceous, there's absolutely no reason to believe that suddenly the Holocene would have turned up and poof! humanoid bipeds by divine will! This is not how evolution works. We are the way we are because of a very weird set of specialized circumstances (I favor the aquatic hypothesis, but I don't think that's relevant to this argument) and all of our technology and language development is a way of making up for the fact that, biologically, we're not terribly efficiently designed.
Think about it: how many other true bipeds do we know of? Tyrannosaurus Rex, of the tiny arms, pretty certainly didn't use them for balance. Trackways suggest that other tyrannosaurids and hadrosaurs and the like walked and ran hind-footed, but like modern kangaroos they dropped down and stuck their front paws in the dirt when it became expedient. Whether you count that as truly bipedal or not, every last one of these is/was build on the plan of the slanted biped with a huge counterbalancing tail, rather than our upright tailless selves. The other primates can choose to walk bipedally, but with a few exceptions raised by humans, they all appear to have the sense to drop down to all fours when they're not trying to impress anybody.
Our weird upright bipedalism is as evolutionarily coincidental as our bizarre technology-- nobody's done it before. And while in our case the two may be related, I don't think they make the kind of cause and effect that would play out the same way under any other circumstances. If you are going to posit a universe with other space-faring species following a separate evolutionary track, even assuming four-limbed creatures with bilateral symmetry is probably unrealistic. If you really want to develop an alien species, go back and look at the Burgess Shale, or fossils of early vertebrates from before bilateral quadrupeds became the main plan, and extrapolate from there.
ETA: have just remembered bipedal birds (ostrich, emu, etc) but I can't think of one of them that had wings that turned into something useful, rather than mostly atrophying. If you want to posit bipedal *armless* aliens, I'll give you a pass for novelty, if not realism.
It's one of those weird human-centric fallacies: you occasionally see exhibits in paleontology museums where someone's built a humanoid lizard on the theory that this is what "might have happened if the dinosaurs hadn't died out." Um... if it didn't happen by the end of the Cretaceous, there's absolutely no reason to believe that suddenly the Holocene would have turned up and poof! humanoid bipeds by divine will! This is not how evolution works. We are the way we are because of a very weird set of specialized circumstances (I favor the aquatic hypothesis, but I don't think that's relevant to this argument) and all of our technology and language development is a way of making up for the fact that, biologically, we're not terribly efficiently designed.
Think about it: how many other true bipeds do we know of? Tyrannosaurus Rex, of the tiny arms, pretty certainly didn't use them for balance. Trackways suggest that other tyrannosaurids and hadrosaurs and the like walked and ran hind-footed, but like modern kangaroos they dropped down and stuck their front paws in the dirt when it became expedient. Whether you count that as truly bipedal or not, every last one of these is/was build on the plan of the slanted biped with a huge counterbalancing tail, rather than our upright tailless selves. The other primates can choose to walk bipedally, but with a few exceptions raised by humans, they all appear to have the sense to drop down to all fours when they're not trying to impress anybody.
Our weird upright bipedalism is as evolutionarily coincidental as our bizarre technology-- nobody's done it before. And while in our case the two may be related, I don't think they make the kind of cause and effect that would play out the same way under any other circumstances. If you are going to posit a universe with other space-faring species following a separate evolutionary track, even assuming four-limbed creatures with bilateral symmetry is probably unrealistic. If you really want to develop an alien species, go back and look at the Burgess Shale, or fossils of early vertebrates from before bilateral quadrupeds became the main plan, and extrapolate from there.
ETA: have just remembered bipedal birds (ostrich, emu, etc) but I can't think of one of them that had wings that turned into something useful, rather than mostly atrophying. If you want to posit bipedal *armless* aliens, I'll give you a pass for novelty, if not realism.
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Date: 2012-03-16 06:14 pm (UTC)That said, I wish they'd stop coddling to the lowest common denominator, and occasionally play with the idea that some of us are actually interested in creatures that aren't just humans from another world.
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Date: 2012-03-16 04:32 pm (UTC)D and I were also talking about this earlier... bipeds expend less energy than quadropeds. In that sense it would make sense that a species would evolve to be a bepid because of less energy.
My problem with the story is that the rest of the game is /not/ hard, old school sci-fi. So those last 15 minutes where it suddenly becomes that makes no sense from a player's POV. The entire sequence of the starchild could be cut and I'd have been much happier even if shepard, the geth, and the reapers died.
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Date: 2012-03-18 02:15 am (UTC)I don't mean to be picking on ME specifically; I do get the tech reasons for populating their universe with bipeds. It's just that the article was going on about how it's so ground-breaking that the aliens don't all look like humans, and then most of them do, so it made a good example. My problem is more with SF as a whole-- as presented pop-culture/graphically, since I don't read/seek out a lot of the genre; I'm sure there are some good alien designs out there that I haven't seen.
I don't buy that bipeds are actually more efficient-- what you gain in only using one set of leg muscles ends up trading off with less speed, harder balance problems, and (in our case) all the weird muscle attachment issues you get from changing a horizontal torso to a vertical one. (back pain, etc) Even if they were, evolution doesn't actually seek out efficiency; it's a long succession of little "ok, this doesn't crash & burn" changes. Possibly even "this gray-green color works a little better than that slightly greener one" or whatever, but it's the series of tiny directionless changes that eventually make things that are majorly different, not a case of the final form being more efficient.
I want to see aliens with five limbs, or radial symmetry, or pseudopods, or no feet at all. And talk is cheap, so I'm going to try to make other people think about it. :)
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Date: 2012-03-17 11:37 am (UTC)