[Dragaera] If the Vlad books were made into a movie...

[Michael Wojcik]

Maximilian Wilson wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Michael Wojcik <mwojcik at newsguy.com> wrote:
>> Scott Schultz wrote:
>>> As far as I know, the lifespans of Cat-Centaurs and
>>> Serioli are unknown, though it seems fair to assume that they are
>>> probably similar to that of Easterners in lieu of any evidence to the
>>> contrary.
>> I don't believe there's any textev for this, but my impression is that
>> while cat-centaurs might have Easterner-magnitude lifespans, Serioli
>> have longer ones. In any case, though, I wouldn't say it's "fair" to
>> make any assumptions about the typical lifespan of either species. We
>> simply don't know.
> 
> That was my first impression too, but Scott's right: Dragaerans were
> specifically engineered for long life by the Jenoine. All other forms
> of animal life that we know of have much shorter lifespans.

Agreed that the text says Dragaerans were given longer lifespans by
the Jenoine - but they are modified humans, and the Serioli are not. I
don't see any reason for concluding that the Dragaeran lifespan says
anything about Serioli lifespan.

And I'm not buying the "other animals have short lifespans" argument,
which I'd call a fallacy of composition. Here on earth, human
lifespan, measured in heartbeats/lifetime, is a statistical outlier,
as Stephen J Gould famously pointed out. Nothing says that Serioli
lifespans should be comparable to those of the other native animals of
Dragaera. For that matter, how much information do we have about the
lifespans of those other native animals?

-- 
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University