The Left Hand of Darkness includes one of the Ekumenical characters musing that, now that there's evidence that the Terran colony was an experiment, the planting of a colony on a world with native humanoid species, she is wondering whether the Gethenians were also an experiment. "It's a disturbing thought."
Here in 2020 it's clear that humans are closely related to chimps and bonobos, and that we're all descended from earlier primate species, and so on back to early unicellular eukaryotes: but in 1970 "here's a handwave that humans look like other primates but aren't their biological cousins" was good enough for novel-writing.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2020-03-22 10:08 am
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Here in 2020 it's clear that humans are closely related to chimps and bonobos, and that we're all descended from earlier primate species, and so on back to early unicellular eukaryotes: but in 1970 "here's a handwave that humans look like other primates but aren't their biological cousins" was good enough for novel-writing.
no subject