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On Plausibility; mulling on the nature of criticism
Topic Started: Aug 19 2017, 03:37 PM (627 Views)
Tartarus
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On producing speculative organisms by working forwards from ancestors to descendants, the issue is just how far back in the ancestry one should go to improve plausibility.
Say for example, one creates a bunch of alien organisms by starting out with some early simple sea creatures and coming up with ways for them to evolve over the next hundreds of millions of years or so based on what sort of geological and environmental changes one chooses to have occurring on their world in that time frame. But even in that case one has essentially started with a later result without first taking account the ancestors- namely because the early sea creatures this hypothetical project began with had to have ancestors as well. Does this mean that one should have started all the way at the beginning, with the world's earliest single-celled microbes and described a potentially very long period of microbe evolution eventually leading to one to several microbe lineages evolving into the world's first multicellular organisms? Or are there times when it is OK to just start out later in the world's evolutionary history and just make the assumption that the desired organisms one begins with did manage to evolve without saying exactly how?
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LittleLazyLass
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So, and I know this is really out of nowhere, but I've been thinking about the forum dynamic regarding spec for a while, as well as how the forum's approach to it often appears to new users and outsiders, and my mind always comes back to this topic. I really must commemorate Nitwhite, it's a great essay. Accordingly, I've decided to pin the thread, an idea I brought up with the staff a while back; nobody at that point seemed opposed, so I've finally gone and done it. I took the liberty of hiding a selection of problematic off-topic posts. Many of these were from myself; I apologize for my behaviour.
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Dr Nitwhite
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WHO DISTURBS MY SLUMB wait it's been what?

I suppose I'm honored, frankly. I'm glad this is still looked at as an interesting enough thread to continue deliberating. I look forward to further conversation!
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