David Silberstein <davids at kithrup.com> writes: > On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Penney, Sean wrote: > > > > >Greg Rapawy said: > > > >>Mellar, a crossbreed (therefore a member of no House > >>by birth) succeeds in joining the Dzur by defeating > >>seventeen Dzur champions in successive duels. > > > >>Vlad comments in _Yendi_ that as Zerika is the last > >>surviving Phoenix there is now no way to produce a > >>Phoenix heir except through crossbreeding. > > >I'm surprised Dragaereans can crossbreed. Since they have the actual > >genes from Orca and Dragons and such, you'd think they would be > >incompatible. > > My notion - which I admit might be wrong, but isn't contradicted by > anything we've seen so far - is that the animal genes that Dragaerans > have are not active DNA, but are rather markers that the Jenoine used > for tracking purposes. So for all practical purposes, all Dragaerans > are the same species, and can produce fertile offspring. Except for a few exceptions (Jhereg, and I think Yendi) people can routinely identify somebodies house from their face. The coding for that has to be *somewhere*; probably in their DNA. Of course, human groups with recognizably distinctive features are interfertile, so this isn't an argument against *that* part of the claim. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / New TMDA anti-spam in test John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/ New Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info