From: "Tony Ellis" 
Subject: (urth) re: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse? (attn. Tony Ellis)
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 18:07:22 +0100

Hey Robert, glad to know you're still out there.

I go for explanation 2: the Annese had the ability, but lost it, and cannot
recover it due to Dollo's Law. If that doesn't make evolutionary sense,
blame Wolfe, not me, because I don't think he would have slipped Dollo's Law
in there unless that was the connection he wanted us to make. Victor may be
self-taught, but we're given to understand that he is intelligent and a
quick study, so I think we're supposed to accept his theory.

I don't even have Victor's qualification to talk about Dollo's Law, but it
seems to me that whatever could cause -some- colonists to lose their
tool-using ability - harsh living conditions, the drug mentioned in 'A Story
', a conscious decision to return to primitivism - could also cause -all-
colonists to lose that ability, especially if there was only a small number
of them to begin with. There would be no viable tool-using population to
lose-out to.


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