(no subject)

[unbibium]

The thing about the second Ringworld books onward is...

rishathra. Lots of it. Apparently Ringworld is all interspecies orgies all the time. Even the vampires work that way.

now, I thought the uncanny valley problem would have prevented stuff like this. On evolution weeds out those who mate with similar-but-different species, because they result in energy expended to produce either no offspring, or occasionally sterile offspring.

except, every so often I hear that humans interbred with neanderthals, and recently, that any human without immediate African ancestry contains some Neanderthal genes, which contradicts that principle.

I don't know. Two distant members of the same genus will produce nothing or a sterile hybrid, but two distant members of the same species can produce some of the strongest offspring. And two members of the same family will produce an inbred, weak offspring. And basically everyone on the Ringworld is descended from Homo habilis. And in Niven's universe, everything we know about human evolution on Earth is wrong anyway because aliens did it.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"Species" is kind of a nebulous concept to some degree. There are different species that can produce fertile offspring, but just don't in the wild in practice because of geographic separation or some similar barrier.

But if they actually do, taxonomists are likely to call them subspecies. My impression about the Neanderthal revelations is that it's pushing people to go back to the classification of neandertalensis as a subspecies of H. sapiens.

And there are humans who will screw anything that moves. Probably always have been.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

So there are, but most societies regard the anything-that-moves guy with some sort of shame, right? (though being from a place that's steeped in Christianity, maybe the places that Christ hasn't reached yet have a glory hole on every street corner.)