>In preparation for _The Paths of the Dead_, I've been re-reading
>_The Phoenix Guards_ and _Five Hundred Years After_. I noticed an
>interesting passage in _Guards_ (it occurs on page 178 of my hardcover
>copy):
>
>
>I can think of three explanations:
>
Of course it could have a scientific answer, we already know
that the Dragerans were lab rats so to speak, and when working with
lab rats, or any kind of lab organism, you work with finite
populations. Given this, if say a male which was a sneezer had a
larger percentage of offspring than any other male in the small lab
population then given that sneezing is a dominant gene, all his
offspring would have the reaction to the furnace. And within one to
three generations, you could expect that most of the lab
populaition--and threfore most of the present day Drageran populaiton
would be photic sneezers, because the trait is more or less fixed in
the populaiton. It is also possible, that it was actually selected
for. It may be that the Jenoine actually wanted the trait bred in
for some reason or...
your possiblity number one (see below)
Now as to our human populaiton, (as opposed to Drageran)
given that it is only at 35% of our the population means three
things, 1) it is not dominant 2) it does not have a simple mechanism
for inheritance---meaning there are several genes involved (the most
likely case) 3) there is actual selection against it -- ie. people
that sneeze when looking at the sun are more often distracted, and
therefore get hit by cars more often.
That said, of your possibilities, I like :
1) Steven Brust is a photic sneezer and doesn't realize (or hadn't
realized) that not everyone is. (Not unusual; it was years and years
before I realized that myself, for instance.)\
JAA
--
Stanford University
Department of Biological Sciences
jalipaz at stanford.edu
Often statistics are used as drunken men use lampposts...
for support rather than illumination.
Albert Einstein