[Dragaera] Boing!

[Philip Hart]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Jon Lincicum wrote:

> Philip Hart wrote:
> >
> > I'm operating under the assumption that Dragaerans have a few native
> > genes with little phenotypic effect beyond some personality tweaks.
> > Plus maybe the e'Kieron gene with at least one large effect.
> >
> > I expect the minor racial variation (slanted eyes, bow legs) between
> > the houses is due to sexual selection (based on fashion or accident
> > or perhaps the above personality tweaks) or drift.
> >
>
> Hold on...
>
> Weren't Dragaeran's just human (Easterner) stock until the Jenoine got
> to meddling with them?

The point is that that the houses are distinct in phenotype and hence
in genotype, but not so much that one must ascribe that difference to
large differences in plunked-in native genes.  We have good reason to
believe some or much of the personality difference is due to xenogenes,
but really that just requires a bare handful of plunks.  Hence we have
no reason to believe there are any more than a very small percentage
of xenogenes.  And I suspect that since there are fairly simple and
clear but most importantly conserved differences we can be pretty
confident of that - but probably that requires a geneticist to rule on.