[Dragaera] Boing!

[Davdi Silverrock]

On 9/7/06, Jon Lincicum wrote:

>
>  But Dragaerans are half again as tall
> as a typical Easterner, have pronounced physical differences (pointy
> ears, noble's points, very thin, &c)

And also relative hairlessness, more notable in males not having any
facial hair.

> and they live on the order of *45 times as long*.
>
> To me, this seems likely to be more than .1% genetic difference...

The only thing that is really outside the range of known human
variation is the slow aging.

Tallness?  Pft, there's plenty of tall, thin people; it would be easy
to figure out how to make tallness a dominant trait.  Same for
everything else.  Heck, it would probably be possible to breed a
population from ordinary humans that would look physically similar to
Dragaerans, if you were willing to be ruthlessly eugenical, without
ever getting into messing about with test tubes of DNA.  All of those
traits are within the 99.9% that's similar among ordinary humans.

The big issue is the aging rate. That, I am willing to admit, might be
a difference that requires more that .1% genetic changes in order to
implement.

> Now, we don't know exactly how much of each given animal got dumped into
> the original Dragaeran stock to achieve these differences... But it
> would seem to be some fairly significant amount. At least, it seems to
> have resulted in some fairly significant differences.
>

I disagree, because the differences between individuals of different
Houses seem suffciently small that one can be confused with another
*because she's wearing clothes of the "wrong" colour*.

"Significant" differences would mean that individuals of each House
would be as distinct as /H. sapiens/, /Pan troglodytes/, /Pongo
pongo/, and /Gorilla gorilla/.  &c.