“You’ll see it when you see a wolf and his imprint together. It’s pretty distinctive. It’s this look they get in their eyes, really focused and intense and tender. Says, you are the center of the universe and I worship the ground you walk on and your wish is my command and I will defend you with my life. It’d be corny if they weren’t so sincere about it...
Did anyone else think “oxytocin!” when they read this? :-)
...
I’m trying to imagine what to expect when the two “werewolf chromosomes” are sequenced and this helps clarify those expectations a bit. The really crazy part about the chromosomes is that is seems likely that the “compatibilism genes” seem to be woven into a regulatory structure, hooking some “as-yet-uncharacterized magical physics” to “well studied biophysical systems” in ways that are obviously complex adaptations and substantially implemented in the genes themselves.
In MoR the in-story working compatibilist hypothesis is that there is a single compatibilism gene that is blindly pattern matched by a very complex magical system, which gives organisms with two copies of the compatibilism gene privileged access to a magical interface of some sort. All the regulatory elements of the magical system in MoR are, by hypothesis, fixed in some magical medium that is outside of the “atoms in motion” mechanisms that modern science is making intelligible. Casting spells accesses the interfaces. Learning the interface may ultimately be the only way it is possible to gain information about the magical medium. Building a spell casting robot without using DNA may simply be impossible.
With the vampire and wolf chromosomes (and witch genes?), there’s a distinct possibility that there are things like “mind sensing proteins”, “atemporallly sensitive proteins”, “telekinesis proteins”, “magical neurotransmitters”, “clairvoyance organs”, or something with physical structure and magical function that interacts by simple physical means with simple physical systems. If a werewolf chromosome was sequenced, and bacteria were used to grow werewolf proteins, I have no idea what precisely to expect, but it seems at leat 50% likely that however things turned out to work, the mechanisms could be learned and re-used so that engineers could eventually create designer proteins/organs/whatever that were more magical than existing magical proteins/organs/whatever and these could be integrated into biomechaincal(?) systems to create “supermagical tools”.
Or not depending on what the microbiologists discover :-P
And then in the meantime the existence of all this complexity sort of demands an explanation as to the source. How could such chromosomes evolve? Are they artificial chromosomes? Maybe there is a whole new hidden species (“science gnomes”?) that create the artificial chromosomes which are still hidden or extinct? Or maybe theism is the only intellectually honest answer? Maybe an entity (a god/demon/ghost/author/whatever) instantiated in a purely magical medium gained access to the world by calling complex physical structure into existence ab initio, and the compatibilist mechanisms are complex because it didn’t occur to the entity to produce something other than chromosomes?
Being honest and genre-aware, my sense is that the author of twilight just said “chromosomes” because she thinks of chromosomes as semi-magical entities anyway, so mentioning chromosomes just seemed to add magical plausibility for similarly minded readers rather than raising a thorny nest of scientific and philosophical issues for the smaller group of people who intuitively grok materialistic reasoning.
Hints like the oxytocin thing keep reminding me that there’s a lot of physics and a lot of open questions left to be worked out in this universe!
It would be neat if Elspeth is forced to work out more rationality than her mother had, with her mother serving as inspiration and warning, and then Elspeth might stumble into some of this. This site probably has a lot of material that could be borrowed to show a plausible rationalist origin story if that’s where the story is headed :-)
Up to Radiance, Chapter 4:
Did anyone else think “oxytocin!” when they read this? :-)
...
I’m trying to imagine what to expect when the two “werewolf chromosomes” are sequenced and this helps clarify those expectations a bit. The really crazy part about the chromosomes is that is seems likely that the “compatibilism genes” seem to be woven into a regulatory structure, hooking some “as-yet-uncharacterized magical physics” to “well studied biophysical systems” in ways that are obviously complex adaptations and substantially implemented in the genes themselves.
In MoR the in-story working compatibilist hypothesis is that there is a single compatibilism gene that is blindly pattern matched by a very complex magical system, which gives organisms with two copies of the compatibilism gene privileged access to a magical interface of some sort. All the regulatory elements of the magical system in MoR are, by hypothesis, fixed in some magical medium that is outside of the “atoms in motion” mechanisms that modern science is making intelligible. Casting spells accesses the interfaces. Learning the interface may ultimately be the only way it is possible to gain information about the magical medium. Building a spell casting robot without using DNA may simply be impossible.
With the vampire and wolf chromosomes (and witch genes?), there’s a distinct possibility that there are things like “mind sensing proteins”, “atemporallly sensitive proteins”, “telekinesis proteins”, “magical neurotransmitters”, “clairvoyance organs”, or something with physical structure and magical function that interacts by simple physical means with simple physical systems. If a werewolf chromosome was sequenced, and bacteria were used to grow werewolf proteins, I have no idea what precisely to expect, but it seems at leat 50% likely that however things turned out to work, the mechanisms could be learned and re-used so that engineers could eventually create designer proteins/organs/whatever that were more magical than existing magical proteins/organs/whatever and these could be integrated into biomechaincal(?) systems to create “supermagical tools”.
Or not depending on what the microbiologists discover :-P
And then in the meantime the existence of all this complexity sort of demands an explanation as to the source. How could such chromosomes evolve? Are they artificial chromosomes? Maybe there is a whole new hidden species (“science gnomes”?) that create the artificial chromosomes which are still hidden or extinct? Or maybe theism is the only intellectually honest answer? Maybe an entity (a god/demon/ghost/author/whatever) instantiated in a purely magical medium gained access to the world by calling complex physical structure into existence ab initio, and the compatibilist mechanisms are complex because it didn’t occur to the entity to produce something other than chromosomes?
Being honest and genre-aware, my sense is that the author of twilight just said “chromosomes” because she thinks of chromosomes as semi-magical entities anyway, so mentioning chromosomes just seemed to add magical plausibility for similarly minded readers rather than raising a thorny nest of scientific and philosophical issues for the smaller group of people who intuitively grok materialistic reasoning.
Hints like the oxytocin thing keep reminding me that there’s a lot of physics and a lot of open questions left to be worked out in this universe!
It would be neat if Elspeth is forced to work out more rationality than her mother had, with her mother serving as inspiration and warning, and then Elspeth might stumble into some of this. This site probably has a lot of material that could be borrowed to show a plausible rationalist origin story if that’s where the story is headed :-)