#hypothetical genetics

[wolvebonez]

hypothetical fawn golden shaded grizzle!

Soooo as I have mentioned briefly I am in a wcrp, in which said wcrp uses genetic terms & has a genetic roller for rp. someone came in and asked what THIS beast might look like

And so I figure I'll share what I came up with since it took me So Fucking Long and I do think enough ppl who follow me might be interested!!

This is the end result!! I will be copy/pasting my explanation & inserting more images below

Im going to be using more basic explanations of a gene and only in relation to how they apply to this cat so im not writing 5 million word

To start, we have a regular fawn ticked tabby!

Wideband then makes the hairs of the cat have more pheomelanin (golden/background color) and less melanin (fawn color), as well as usually restricting the melanin to the tip of the hair.

Theeennnn we introduce silver (as seen below), which reduces the amount of pigment found in the pheomelanin; when combined with wideband making a cat look particularly pale (since any melanin in the wideband-effected hairs can also be broken up/less "solid," it can result in melanin looking more diluted/warm, it can also visually lighten the melanin areas on a cat.) I probably should've made the pale parts more desaturated at this point but ignoring that….

This is where we get Really Hypothetical!

As far as I'm aware we don't really know what chausie grizzle is or does. I've seen sources like messybeast (lol) claim that it is just silver-tipping found in black chausies/melanistic jungle cats but I dissagree. I personally believe a theory [User] initially mentioned to me is more probable; the idea that it is moreso the expansion of agouti; Potentially making the tabby hairs of the cat have more melanin than normal. (Maybe also restricts it towards the base of the hair to explain the satin-like appearance it can have?)

So…given that they basically would have the opposite effects assuming that this is true, there's really no saying how they'd interact. They could cancel eachother out, one could be dominant over the other, ect… There's also no telling which one of these options is more likely.

I went with the idea that the grizzle would be more dominant/have more effect, but that the wideband could potentially still be in effect where the grizzle seems to be least present (around the belly & flanks) which kind of breaks up the solid-ness of most grizzle cats (since grizzle does vary a lot.)

Silver would still work the same throughout all of this & make the phaeomelanin a lighter almost-white color. (There's a potential grizzle also does this too? But. shrug.) …Again I really should've made the light yellow color more silver-colored but i digress.

Now we have colorpoint! Also have no clue if it'd have some weird secret surprise fucked up effect on grizzle but it does seem to be a fairly reliable gene in that it is just a form of albinism so it should have a similar or same effect on everything. It just inhibits colors in the warmer areas of the body & allows it in the colder parts (thus, extremities!)

....And from there you've guys seen what I did when I added the thai white! Not sure how DBE would effect it, but I made my best guess & it wasn't the most important part of this . adventure jdbhjhg

Oh, bonus picture of my canvas with the most refs i've ever used for one piece lol. (Digital piece, anyway. Ceramics is another thing entirely....)

shoutout to @/felinefractious for sourcing pretty much all of said refs lmao

[astrowarr]

the urge to write a roomies zombie apocalypse au is so strong right now. they're just the Most zombie apocalypse au people EVER like they would make so much sense as a little gang

[proosh]

Dumb question but if Lud got Gil pregnant would their child be fine 🤔

Not a dumb question at all! I have a pretty simple answer to this:

I sincerely do not think that nations operate on anything close to the nuances and complexities of regular human genetics. So yeah, probably, any hypothetical child of theirs would be as "fine" as any other nation/representation.

[supercantaloupe]

the thing is while i would desperately love to have a little kitty cat in my apartment to keep me company and taking care of a creature would probably help me keep on top of my self and home care routines, i think i am just too busy and stressed and have too little time to take care of a cat rn on top of everything else i have to do at work school and home

[futurewife]

my f/os: hey dimples

me: 🥰🥰😍☺️☺️🥰🥰😊😍☺️😊😊

[chipped-chimera]

Goldfish post got me looking up Betta genetics more seriously this time and ughhhhh it's HAPPENING AGAIN I WILL BITE A GOD

If I ever get into breeding it's 120% going to have a health focus FIRST because at the current rate we're breeding them into the floor, we won't have anything livable left.

[dogencool]

I’m not really a character music playlist maker but I think any Hobie Brown playlist that doesn’t have at least one song from Dead Kennedys, The Damned, Pure Hell, and X-Ray Spex on it has something wrong with it

[suboptimal-xenobiologist]

Guys I'm so incredibly sorry. My brain is currently full of gen 1 my little pony thoughts only suitable for the fictbio blog

[littleraeofsunshineda]

I love it when they do this.

My fiancé is regularly struck anew by the absurdity of listening to a radio program on which a man boldly asserted that every man's worst fear is raising a child that isn't his own

He still recalls the horror that he was driving and had to wait 25 minutes to get home, wake me up, and exclaim in strangled tones but what about.... spiders...???!!!

[playingplayer2]

Brought up cannibalism to my mother again and it was the trying to establish the fact that I am not, in fact, interested in participating in cannibalism that made her look at me funny because I was apparently "protesting a bit much" lmfao.

[today-i-am-thinking-about]

when you sweat so much it gets in your eyes

[ochibrochi]

spontaneous magic manifestation was NOT mentioned in the parenting handbook 😬

I know this isn’t how magic in dc works, but the fact that Damian’s ancestry includes some pretty powerful magic users is… INTERESTING 🤔? Drabble under the cut!

I wanna preface that I'M NOT SAYIN' that Damian should/does have magic powers, but there’s still so much unexplored potential with Damian's character, and the thought that he has a dormant adeptness in magic is somewhat compelling to me. Most importantly it would FREAK! BRUCE! OUT!!!!! What is this, magic puberty 😭??

By DC laws, anyone has the ability to learn magic, but it is also possible to be an innate ability. The Al Ghuls are no strangers to the occult-- Ra's has had increasingly been portrayed as a magic user, and the recent establishment of his mother being a sorceress/witch?? Even Talia dabbled in a bit of magic, I think. There is a catch that their power is suggested to be due to Lazarus exposure, but for arguments sake let's say the Al Ghul lineage is inherently proficient in magic (and Lazarus exposure simply enhances it).

I can't recall "magic" being a part of Damian's training/upbringing (I'm still slowly catching-up on Damian comics so apologies if I miss any canon examples of magic use). Not sure why Talia wouldn't want her little "heir to an ancient assassin empire baby" to learn magic, but it would at least give reason to Damian not knowing about his magic potential, or lack of interest in it.

Through the power of pseudo storytelling, what if Damian's encounter with Mother Soul could have triggered a manifestation of magic that was once dormant; like a pressure cooker waiting to explode with energy when it hasn't been given a safe outlet.

I've yet to read a satisfying arc where Damian truly gets to contemplate his Al Ghul roots outside of "dad is good guy, mum is bad guy". Damian's initial character growth stems from him running away from, and renouncing his association with the League (i.e. "I'm nothing like you, mother and grandfather!").

The most recent thing I've read was Robin (2021), and whilst Damian is much more cordial with his mother, there's still an emotional distance and sense of distrust/resentment (for good reason, even if the context was some cartoonishly evil writing). But there is a silver-lining that they still appear to be fond of each other, in a melancholy kind of way.

Realizing he's "genetically" primed for magic would be especially confronting to Damian. There's no denying his Al Ghul blood, forcing him to confront a facet of himself he can no longer ignore or reject. A family that he likely has to approach for help/guidance.

Damian is put in a position of acknowledging this power could be used for good, to be stronger, to fight crime, balancing it with the implication that what he possesses could be rooted in dark magic (Lazarus enchantment).

If he decides to embrace it, would that be too much of an endorsement of the Al Ghul's dark occultism? Can he separate the two ideas? What if he can't control it? What if he accidentally hurts someone? What if has the ability to save someone where his other skills fall short?

Ideally, I'd love for this hypothetical story to lead into Damian exploring his Al Ghul heritage more intimately, historically, and spiritually (à la RSoB: Year of Redemption adventures). Another little coming-of-age self discovery journey.

I have my own little personal thoughts on what Damian decides to do with his magic powers, but I'd like to leave that open to interpretation... By the end of it I hope that he will at least find some forgiveness over resentment, and a balance between accepting that side of his family a little easier. It is finally a sense of inner peace :)

Any thoughts? Did I get any characterisation wrong? Let's talk over on my DC blog @arkhamochi! I'm currently trying to read all Damian-centric comics until I catch up with the current run. I'm hungry for discussion and analysis!!!!!!

[nine-fingered-entity]

i think one of the cool things about knowing an author personally and then reading their novel must be being able to recognize bits and pieces of Them and their life experiences and interests and such within the novel. my cousin wrote a novel and when i read it, i immediately recognized my cousin through the pages, and her life bleeding through. and like, her novel was realistic literary fiction, and like fewer degrees of separation from reality, so maybe it was just really noticeable in this case, but i have to imagine this is true on some level for all books. people write about what they care about.

[diluc33rpm]

2/3 If you lost all your memories, would you have the same personality?

uh yeah, obviously. i haven't taken any adderall today but my name's still zachary isn't it

[versias]

Demon Twins AU

- Maddie was trained by the League of Assassins and was sent back to America to pursue her theory that Lazarus water was ectoplasmic residue. She joined the only paranormal studies course in the country and met likeminded scientists Jack Fenton and Vlad Masters.

- Maddie fell in love with Jack and they pursued their research together, attempting to break into the “ghost zone”, the hypothetical in-between where the energy of death collected in order to collect pure ectoplasm samples. (And possibly capture a ghost for study.)

- They Sort-Of succeeded (sorry Vlad but science marches on) and Maddie proved ectoplasm and Lazarus water were related. LoA allowed her to stay and continue her research, providing her with funding so long as she sent reports. Occasionally she had to do a mission since she was in the area, but it was usually simple and low stakes.

- Then, when Jazz is 2 years old, Maddie is called back to the League to witness the birth of the Demon’s Heirs. The babies were grown in LW using her data so she basically has to become a physician for the babies.

- The younger twin’s heart stopped when he was pulled out of the water. She rushed to save him, using pure ectoplasm from her research and it worked. Even though Danyal is deemed the inferior twin, he’s kept alive and trained to act as a benchmark/motivation for the true heir Damian.

- Maddie falls in love with the little boy whose health she’s in charge of. Talia notes that this researcher cares for her child as if it was her own.

- When Ra’s decides to have Danny and Damian duel as a sort of initiation and trial to prove his worth as the heir (something that leaves psychological scars on both Danny and Damian, thanks Ra’s.), Damian kills Danny and Maddie is devastated over the body.

- Talia grabs her and the body and sneaks them into the Lazarus pits to bring her child back. Then she hands Danny to Maddie and tells her to raise him as her own, protect him as her own, and she will erase Maddie’s debt to the league.

- Maddie runs with her new son back to America and tells her family that the job she had is completed and “hey Jack sorry I forgot to mention our son I was so caught up in my work! Yeah, whenever I visited five years ago I got pregnant and forgot to mention it! Whoopsie daisy!”

- Jack believes this because he’s forgetful sometimes and also why would his lovely, beautiful, brilliant wife lie to him. He welcomes five year old Danny into his life as his son despite him only superficially looking like him and for some reason having much darker skin. Who knows, genetics isn’t his area of expertise!

- Besides even if Maddie lied to him she probably had a good reason! He’s always wanted a son anyway!!

- Jazz is far more suspicious of this but she’s all of seven and also this poor kid looks terrified and traumatized so. She’ll let it go. And also help him settle in, as is right for a Big Sister.

- Danny has psychological and physical scars but grows up loved and cared for. He misses his brother, but he wasn’t worthy to stand beside him—grandfather said so and it must be so. He didn’t want to be a weight on his brother’s neck, dragging him down

- He makes friends with Tucker and then Sam who don’t judge him for strange mannerisms and who like him for who he is.

- Maybe it’s not the life he would have chosen for himself, but it is a good life. He decides he can be happy here in Amity Park, secure in the knowledge that his brother was off conquering and thriving.

- Then Maddie and Jack finish the Portal, which would theoretically allow travel into the Ghost Zone to continue their work. The pinhole fractures they can now reliably create to power weapons and technology prove the theory and this is the next step!

- Danny Dies In The Portal and a hole is ripped open between worlds. DP series takes place as normal!

- Mixed Reveal since Maddie and Jack are researchers first and foremost. They don’t want to hurt their children but they want to study! They capture a different ghost so they can learn more about how the anatomy works, because they need to take care of their half-ghost son.

- Danny is appalled and horrified to find them dissecting some struggling specter. They are so fucking earnest about it, trying to tell him that they want to make sure they understand how he’s put together so if he gets hurt they can help and it’s not like they can Kill ghosts so it’s only a temporary necessity in pursuit of knowledge!!

- Danny releases the ghost and later, steals their research and destroys the portal. He flees. He knows they won’t hurt him but he thought they wouldn’t Do That either and they did so he’s terrified.

- Danny’s friends help him escape and set up a fake id and passport. His plan is to get to Gotham and find the Bat who will hopefully be able to Adult this situation. He’s not expecting to be welcomed as his son; by all accounts the Batman has no idea Talia even made children with his DNA so he isn’t even going to mention being his son.

- Meanwhile Damian has been Robin for four years and slowly adjusting to his new normal. He doesn’t think about his dead brother; he isn’t allowed to, and though he’s left the league, the league has not left him entirely.

- He is patrolling with his father when an unknown teenager flags them down. Batman is suspicious of course but the kid seems to be earnestly calling for help. He has Robin hang back out of caution and approaches the unknown himself.

- Holy Fuck He Looks Like Damian

- He doesn’t act like a clone or anything. He has an impressively obvious midwestern accent and uses slang like a typical teen. He tells him, a little hysterically, about his parents being scientists and the fucking portal to hell they opened in their basement, about finding them experimenting on an inter-dimensional being that may or may not be an actual human spirit, and briefly details taking his sisters car across four states in a manic road trip to find the Batman.

- Batman is like, why me? There are closer heroes. Why not call the justice league hotline?

- “Hoo boy Mr. Batman see the thing is Amity Park is Dangerous and full of ghosts so I didn’t want metas showing up where they’d get overshadowed and I’d have to? Like? Fight a possessed Superman or something.”

- Why would you be the one fighting??

- Danny is impressively bad at keeping his mouth shut about secrets but to be fair, he’s meeting his father for the first time and the Batman is super cool and intimidating and also he’s remembering his mom and his brother and that’s reminding him of his new family and how everything has probably irreparably fallen apart and oh no

- Oh no he’s crying in front of Batman. Oh fuck, he’s sobbing in front of his father and this is his first impression. Oh ancients he’s never gonna want anything to do with Danny after this mess and it’s not like he was going to say anything but apparently there was this small hope at the bottom of his heart that he’d be welcomed and loved. That somehow his Father would just know this was his son and hug him and make everything better.

- Batman is awkwardly trying to decide if he wants to risk hugging a dangerous unknown, unstable possible-meta-adjacent teenager while he’s having a breakdown on a rooftop when Robin lands next to him and says something that freezes the blood in Bruce’s veins:

- “Brother?”

[o-craven-canto]

Filters in the way of technologically advanced life in the universe and how likely I think they are

1. Abiogenesis (4.4-3-8 billion years ago): Total mystery. The fact that it happened so quickly on Earth (possibly as soon as there was abundant liquid water) is a tiny bit of evidence for it being easy. Amino acids and polycyclic hydrocarbons are very common in space, but nucleotides aren't, and all hypothetic models I've seen require very specific conditions and a precise sequence of steps. (It would be funny if the dozen different mechanisms proposed for abiogenesis were all happening independently somewhere.)

2. Oxygenic photosynthesis (3.5 billion years ago) (to fuel abundant biomass, and provide oxygen or some other oxidizer for fast metabolism): Not so sure. Photosynthesis is just good business sense -- sunlight is right there -- and appeared several times among bacteria. But the specific type of ultra-energetic photosynthesis that cracks water and releases oxygen appeared only once, in Cyanobacteria. That required merging two different photosynthetic apparati in a rather complex way; and all later adoptions of oxygenic photosynthesis involved incorporating Cyanobacteria by endosymbiosis. For all that it's so useful, I don't know if I'd expect to see it on every living planet.

3. Eukaryotic cell (2.4 billion years ago?): Probably the narrowest bottleneck on the list. Segregated mitochondria with their own genes and a nucleus protecting the main genome are extremely useful both for energy production (decentralized control to maximize production without overloading) and for genetic storage (less DNA damage due to reactive metabolic waste). But there's a chicken-and-egg problem in which incorporating mitochondria to make energy requires an adjustable cytoskeleton, but that consumes so much energy it would require mitochondria already in place. Current models have found solutions that involve a very specific series of events. Or maybe not? Metabolic symbiosis, per se, is common, and there may have been other ways to gene-energy segregation. Besides, after the origin of eukaryotes, endosymbiosis occurred at least nine more times, and even some bacteria can incorporate smaller cells.

4. Sexual reproduction (by 1.2 billion years ago): Without meiotic sex (combining mutations from different lineages, decoupling useful traits from harmful ones, translating a gene in multiple way), the evolution of complex beings is going to be painfully slow. Bacteria already swap genes to an extent, and sexual recombination is bundled in with the origin of eukaryotes so I probably shouldn't count it separately (meiosis is just as energy-intensive as any other use of the cytoskeleton). Once you have recombination, life cycles with spores or gametes and sex differentiation probably follow almost inevitably.

5. Multicellularity (800 million years ago?): Quite common, actually. Happens all the time among eukaryotes, and once in a very limited form even among bacteria. Now we'd want complex organized bodies with geometry-defining genes, but even that happened thrice: in plants, fungi, and animals. As far as I know, various groups of yeasts are the only regressions to unicellularity.

6. Brains and sense organs (600 million years ago): Nerve cells arose either once or twice, depending on whether Ctenophora (comb-jellies) and Eumetazoa (all other animals except sponges) form a single clade or not. Some form of cellular sensing and communication is universal in life, though, so a tissue specialized for signal transmission is probably near inevitable once you have multicellular organisms whose lifestyle depends on moving and interacting with the environment. Sense organs that work at a distance are also needed, but image-forming eyes evolved in six phyla, so no danger there (and there's so many other potential forms of communication!). Just to be safe, you'll also want muscles and maybe mineralized skeletons on the list, but I don't think either is particularly problematic. An articulated skeleton is probably better than a rigid shell, but we still have multiple examples of that (polyplacophorans, brittle stars, arthropods, vertebrates).

7. Life on land (400 million years ago): (Adding this because air has a lot more oxygen to fuel brains than water (the most intelligent aquatic beings are air-breathers), and technology in water has the issue of fire.) You're going to need a waterproof integument, some kind of rigid support system, and kidneys to regulate water balance. Plenty of animal lineages moved on land: vertebrates, insects, millipedes, spiders, scorpions, multiple types of crabs, snails, earthworms, etc. Note that most of those are arthropods: this step seems to favor exoskeletons, which help a great deal in retaining water. Of course this depends on plants getting on land first, which on Earth happened only once, and required the invention of spores and cuticles. (Actually there are polar environments where all photosynthesis occurs in water, but they are recently settled and hardly the most productive.)

8. Human-like intelligence (a few million years ago?): There seems to a be a general trend in which the max intelligence attainable by animals on Earth has increased over time. There's quite a lot of animals today that approach or rival apes in intelligence: elephants, toothed cetaceans, various carnivorans, corvids, parrots, octopodes, and there's even intriguing data about jumping spiders. Birds seem to have developed neocortex-like brain structures independently. Of course humans got much farther, but the fact that even other human species are gone suggests that a planet is not big enough for more than one sophont, so the uniqueness of humans might not necessarily imply low probability. (We seem to exist about halfway through the habitability span of Earth land, FWIW.) The evolution of sociality should probably be lumped here: we'll want a species that can teach skills to its offspring and cooperate on tasks. But sociality is also a common and useful adaptation: many species on our list (octopodes are a glaring exception) are intensely social and care for their offspring. I mentioned above that the land-step favors exoskeletal beings, which in turns favors small size; but the size ranges of large land arthropods and very intelligent birds overlap, so that's not disqualifying.

9. Agriculture and urban civilization (11,000 years ago): Agriculture arrived quite late in the history of our species, but when it arrived -- i.e. at the end of the Wurm glaciation -- it arrived independently in four to eight different places around the world, in different biogeographic realms and climates, so I must assume that at least some climate regimes are great for it (glacial cycles are a minority of Earth's history; but did agriculture need to come after glaciations? Maybe a shock of seasonality did the trick). And once you have agriculture, complex urbanized societies follow most of the time, just a few millennia later. Even writing arose at least three times (Near East, China, and Mexico), and then spread quickly.

10. Scientific method and industrialization (300 years ago): We're getting too far from my expertise here, but whatever. The Eurasian Axial Age suggests that all civilizations with a certain degree of wealth, literacy, and interconnection will spawn a variety of philosophies. Philosophical schools that focus on material causes and effects like the Ionians or Charvaka have appeared sometimes, but often didn't win over more supernaturalist schools. Perhaps in pre-industrial times pure materialism isn't as useful! You may need to thread a needle between interconnected enough to exchange and combine ideas, and also decentralized enough that the intellectual elite can't quash heterodoxy. As for industrialization, that too happened only once, though that's another case in which the first achiever would snuff out any other. I hear Song China is a popular contender for alternative Industrial Revolutions (with coal-powered steelworks!); Imperial Rome and the Abbasid Caliphate are less convincing ones. For whatever reason, it didn't take until 18th century Britain.

11. Not dying randomly along the way: Mass extinctions killing off a majority of species happened over and over -- the Permian Great Dying, the Chicxulub impact, the early Oxygen Crisis -- but life has always rebounded fairly quickly and effectively. It's hard enough to sterilize an agar plate, let alone a planet. Disasters on this scale are also unlikely to happen in the lifespan of planet-bound civilizations, unless of course the civilizations are causing them. A civilization might still face catastrophic climate change, mega-pandemics, and nuclear war, not to mention lesser setbacks like culture-wide stagnation or collapse, and I couldn't begin to estimate how common, or ruinous, they would actually be.

****

I have no idea how common the origin of life is, but the vast majority of planets with life will only have bacterial mats and stromatolites. Of the tiny sliver that evolved complex cells, a good chunk will have their equivalents of plants and animals, most of which may have intelligent life at least on primate- or cetacean-level at some later point. At any given time, a tiny fraction of those will have agricultural civilizations, at an even tinier fraction of that will have post-industrial science and technology. Let's say maybe 1 planet with industrial technology out of 100 with agriculture, 100,000 with hominid-level intelligence, 10 million with animal-like organisms, 100 millions with complex cells, and 10 billions with life at all?