Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 15:57:08 -0800 (PST)
From: Jerry Friedman 
Subject: Re: (urth) horn + horn, sev + sev

--- Don Doggett  wrote:
>  Marc writes:
> 
> However, if we accept that Severian can become a
> > vanished person, then this response is not absurd.
> 
> I think it only stands to reason that Severian would become a vanished
> person if Blue is Ushas.  Remember in Apu Punchau's tomb when the
> Hierodules
> explain to Severian that even though he was an eidolon, as he took in
> the
> food and water and air of his environment it would be incorporated into
> his
> body and make it real?  Severian would most certainly evolve with his
> surroundings and whatever created the polyploidy in all the other
> creatures
> would affect him as well.  The other Severian's are perhaps visitors
> from
> the corridors of time.

Just thought I'd mention that polyploidy is a red herring.  It means
having a multiple (by an integer greater than 1) of the usual number
of chromosomes.  It has nothing to do with the number of limbs in
animals.  Hypothetical plant-animal hybrids might have a full set of
chromosomes from each parent, I guess, but I don't think that would be
called polyploidy.

I'm not refuting claims that Blue is Ushas, felwolves are descended
from wolves (or wolfs), and the like (though those claims seem very
unlikely to me--in contrast to the claim that something is very weird,
possibly sentient, about the trees).  I'm just saying that "polyploidy"
isn't the word you want.  For those who believe that the Bluvian
animals were produced by doubling limbs, eyes, and whatever of Urth
animals, can some Greek scholar come up with the word?  Dimerization?

Jerry Friedman

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