> -----Original Message----- > From: Matthew Hunter [mailto:matthew at infodancer.org] > Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 1:21 PM > To: dragaera at dragaera.info > Subject: Re: Morrolan's father > > This makes me begin to wonder if perhaps Morrolan is half-human. > > Have we ever seen a Dragaerean-Easterner crossbreed? I can't > recall one, but I also can't recall any statements to the effect > it's impossible. I don't like to make too many comparisons between them and my mice in the lab, but... the Easterners were brought in as "controls" for experiments done on Dragaerans. An experimental control can be a number of things. When we make transgenic mice, a trick often used is to mate a wildtype or a heterozygous with a homozygous transgenic, and do your experiments on the resulting offspring, who are genotyped to determine which are wild-type, hetero, or homozygous transgenics, using the wild-type littermates as controls. So you see that wild-type are used both to generate the initial strain and then, sensibly enough, as controls. I postulate that Easterners were not exactly brought in as controls. They were brought in as experimental animals, the transgenics made from their oocytes, & Easterners in general were used as controls. In that case, it is very likely that they can mate with Dragaerans. That gives support to my hope that the Easterners will replace the Phoenix in the Cycle when Zerika's turn is up. She has an Eastern lover after all. Any children of hers by him would be Phoenix (if the appropriate events happened at his/her birth.) Hm. What happens to Phoenix' offspring who didn't get the flyover? Are they Houseless? Rachel