--- Scott Schultz <scott at cjhunter.com> wrote: > > > In all the cases that I can think of, the similarity between > > animal and House is rather superficial. So while the Houses > > may have some stereotypical traits that are genetically > > inherited, it is reasonable to conclude that the traits are > > probably distinct from the animal genes. > > > > Unless, of course, there is magic going on. > > > > Since there almost certainly IS magic going on, you can pretty much > throw > your standard twenty-first-century Terran understanding of genetics out > the window. Maybe. > Aliera almost certainly uses sorcery to do her genetic scanning. Undoubtedly. > The > Jenoine themselves are sorceror/magicians more than scientists in the > sense > that we normally consider such. They're from another > universe/plane-of-existence and play by different rules. I don't think we know that at all. They apparently do experiments. > As someone pointed out earlier, we don't really know if Aliera and her > fellow geneticists really understand the concept of DNA. True, just like Mendel and other early geneticists. > What they call > "genes" may very well be something metaphysical that has only a > superficial resemblance to what we call DNA. That's also possible, but it's a much bigger speculative step. I take it you're thinking of something like original sin that supposedly gets passed from parent to child in some non-physical way. You want to understand "gene" differently in the Dragaeran books; I want to understand "magic" differently. As far as I can tell, Dragaeran "magic" could simply be physics that's unknown to us. (Someone, I forget who, mentioned Clarke's Law.) The Jenoine would then have found some way to create or amplify a connection between human brains and some bafflegab field. It's entirely possible then that what Aliera means by "gene" is what we mean; she just has better ways of perceiving them than we do and the Jenoine have better ways of manipulating them. Your picture *might* be vulnerable to the same argument I used against the idea that Dragaerans have functioning animal genes. Maybe the metaphysical genes of animals (whatever they are) are just as interdependent as the physical genes and just as hard to transplant in a sensible way. Then again, maybe not. > When the Jenoine engineered the Dragaerans, it's likely that they > engineered > them metaphysically as well as what we would think of as "genetic > engineering". From that perspective, the animal genes might be totally > inert > from the conventional bio-chemical standpoint yet be very active on the > metaphysical level. Like acting by means of sympathetic magic? That hadn't occurred to me. Nonetheless, I don't remember any evidence of sympathetic magic in Dragaera. It's used in witchcraft, but Vlad says witchcraft is just a way of focusing psychic energy; the witch uses sympathetic magic for its effect on his/her mind. > Even if the bio-engineering included no metaphysical > tampering, it's still a near-certainty that they used "magic" as one of > their tools. In our real-world genetics, you can't mix man and frog, and > even if you managed it you wouldn't get a frog-man. In fantasy > magic-based > genetics,though, the magic is the hand-waving mechanism that lets you > achieve whatever result it is you want to achieve. You just accept that > it's > "magical" and move on. > > In the words of Don Bellisario (in reference to the fans of Quantum Leap > that dissected every episode in an effort to draw conclusions and > correlations from them) - "Don't examine this too closely." Not bad advice for this list. I'll have to agree with you that we don't know. Since I don't have a copy of _Jhereg_ on hand, I still hope someone will post the bit from Chapter 9 about animal genes. The way I remember it, Aliera is not even certain that the Jenoine did splice animal genes into the Dragaerans. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail