Posts tagged evolution
Lets say there is one being (it can as intelligent as a dog or an average human). But lets also give it/him a bit more unorthodox situations. He/it doesn't need to sleep and eat. Nor also his cel...
Far into the future, humanity is largely split into 2 groups. The first group consists of space-dwelling humans, who live in enormous space stations equipped to sustain human life indefinitely, ...
I want to create a modern population which is adapted to stress. Meaning people could take immense mental pressures without getting into mental disorders. I thought a way to do this would be to bri...
The Lorting are a very strange race. Not only are there multiple genders (the actual term for which is more like 'castes' or 'classes'), but when any member of their species is 'born' it is born at...
As a matter of course, a number of scientific articles and books have held speculation as to the possibility of life on a Jovian (gas giant such as Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, etc). Typically, this co...
Microraptors are cretaceous-period dinosaurs with feathered wings on both their forelimbs and back-limbs. Despite this, they are not considered 'true flyers' as it is believed they used their five...
Kind of a "universal donor" or "universal recipient"? Aliens that can take on the qualities of several kinds of species and recombine them to make a kind of "super" being?
Anytime one thinks "flightless bird" and "aquatic bird" put together, one would immediately think of Sphenisciformes, the penguins. But during the Late Cretaceous, there swam a different kind of f...
There's a Kardashev scale in which Earth civilisation is at 0 (the lowest) level with all following levels being purely hypothetical and describing civilisations more advanced than human. Is there...
Humans sleep more then nearly any other creature (true sleep, not low-activity like cats and sloths), and are some of the only true sapient species on earth. Many other intelligent, or nearly sapi...
Every species I'm aware of on earth has two sexes (with the possible exception of species which change their sexes to allow self fertilization). Is it possible for a species to evolve which could ...
In my Fantasy world I thought it would be interesting to have a creature whose eyes would be precious gemstones or crystals. I want to understand how that could be possible, and if any ramification...
Here's the scenario: 400 million years ago, a species of lobe-finned fish created tetrapod history as it gulped up air, not water. Fast-forward to 342 million years ago, and one species immediate...
Another mermaid questions I'm afraid! Fish have tail fins which are vertical, whales have fins which are horizontal. My race of merfolk are: Very active (more likely to be warm blooded) Have gil...
Mars gets somewhat nice In about 1.6 billion years, the sun's habitable zone will have moved outward, increasing the carbon dioxide in Mars's atmosphere. According to Wikipedia, its surface temper...
What natural environmental pressures or opportunities might drive an alien ophidian species to evolve sapience and caudal tool use? Conditions The species should be lacking limbs prior to the e...
Need ideas for the evolution of the kumiho, the Korean nine tailed fox that is native in the Korean peninsula. First of all, this species is sex...
Starting with a creature and its environment, how does one create its psychology? Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology attempt to explain attributes that we observe in our fellow human...
It's hard to create a new animal from scratch. If you genetically modify an existing species until it becomes a drastically different species, then implant the fertilized embryo in a female of th...
Current technological level. (in the setting there is an awful tech stagnation, so waiting for better DNA engineering technology is considered as waste of time) Possibility to use all contemporary ...
There have been many questions of moving, floral animals, most of these focus on their intelligence, but what about their sense of sight. I fail to understand how a botanic based alien would be abl...
A plethora of previous questions have queried the existence of botanic (plant) intelligence and they all have created good solutions, but their still remains a even bigger problem to even the dumbe...
Alternate question title: From Fungi to a Fun Guy So, I asked a previous question about which non-animal would be the likeliest to evolve sentience. The answer turned out to be fungus, since mycel...
On the Life Ball of my fantasy stories, a particular species of delphinidae- I call them black dolphins- have evolved and advanced at least as much as humans and other intelligent races. A prior q...
I'm going to borrow many ideas from birds to keep my dragon airborne, porous bones and feathers to keep it light while spewing balls of flame to create warm air currents at high altitudes. The prob...
Before you comment "dragons can't happen", we've been there before. Based on the question linked above, assume dragons are scientifically plausible. You may change what you need about the...
How could a civilization create a dangerous autonomous mechanical ecosystem that will not be overly dangerous to its creators? Militaries are expensive; military research doubly so. So what's a sm...
Could a civilization grow or develop to advanced levels if they don't hold religious beliefs? I have just watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Who watch the watchers" (season 3, episode 4). It...
The common evolutionary belief is that life originated in water, and that it developed to survive on land later on. Eventually, mammals evolved on land. Cetaceans, which include dolphins, whales, ...
WARNING THE FOLLOWING CONTAIN SPOILERS! I watched the first season of The 3% and I am wondering about the wisdom in the strategy adopted by this world. Spoilers Specifically, if the 3% ( "smar...
By using antibiotics too frequently, some argue, we're setting the world up for a pandemic that we cannot treat. Every time an antibiotic substance is used, the bacteria that survive reproduce. Ev...
Many pets are very disturbed by the presence of mirrors or other reflecting surfaces where they see their own image. If there were many reflecting surfaces in nature I would think that it would rep...
A civilization has a "magic" computer with memory and processing capacities far beyond what our physics says is possible. They decide to run a massive simulation of Conway's Game of Life with a ran...
Suppose in the future (about 3-4 decades in the future), we start preferring smaller people as mates. The average size of a human would go down, maybe as far as or further than average heights from...
Simulation of artificial panspermia, in inter-galactic travel, as a model for the study of reproductive isolation. Case 1: If we send a mass of proto cells(kept alive by some mechanism like cr...
A good summary of the Zerg race is given on wikipedia as follows: The Zerg are a collective consciousness of a variety of different races assimilated into the Zerg genome. The Zerg were origina...
I have wondered what a terrestrial ecosystem would look like dominated by cnidarians and ctenophores rather than insects and tetrapods. In order to fulfill the same niches I imagine they would need...
Not a duplicate of "Overcoming language barrier; no speech" which confines answers to nothing that is clearly a form of communication; it focuses on translation, not physiology or evolution Not a ...
In the spirit of Thanksgiving (US) let's tackle a fun one. I'm defining "intelligent" in this situation as "at least on par with hunter-gatherer humans, able to communicate" What natural, environm...
I am a huge Minecraft fan and just realized, this hasn't been asked before, so I wanted to ask a live-long (31. August 2009) question, and pay my obulus to the Anatomically Correct series. I have ...
BioSteel is a substance produced by goats whose DNA has received the silk-producing genes of spiders. While silkworms are generally social creatures, spiders are reclusive, meaning they cannot be...
I'm writing a science fiction novel set 100 million years in the future, but humanity is still the same basic form we have today, biologically speaking. Would 100 million years of evolution drastic...
I was thinking about how humans have evolved from apes to what we are now, while apes still remain a species that isn't extinct. Is it possible that the human race will evolve into a species that c...
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." "” H.P. Lovecraft One example of this is the universal fear of the da...
Without a doubt, the most iconic mammals of Australia are the pouch-bearing marsupials. You can find less than 250 species in that one island-continent. Marsupials have been around for 65 milli...
In a world I am building, I want the primary species to be 100% peaceful. The best way I have thought of for doing this post-sapience is to remove all identifying traits (skin, eye and hair color, ...
Space nets are a theoretical space organism designed by Tim B, to quote him: Imagine a life-form shaped like a giant net. It gathers space dust into itself to grow, using light from stars bot...
So, like my question says, I've been wondering if a rocky planet, that looks much like our planet from the surface (oceans, forests, mountains, ext) could be possible. I've read through a good nu...
Slenderman is unarguably the most iconic creation of the early internet. It has led to games, stories and even books. But is his design evolutionarily possible? What evolutionary pressures would le...
The Problem In a world I am building, the days are 9 years long, this means 4 and half years of cold darkness following 4 and a half years of blistering daylight. I have asked questions on this Ye...
