raisindot wrote:Jan Van Quirm wrote:Why can't you work in a plausible evolutionary concept that does allow the key aspect - Jack Cohen (of Science of the Discworld fame) always cites the 'common ancestor' of all land vertebrates as being responsible for our having such awful respiratory probs because our airways are in front of our digestive tract (or is it the other way around?
). His point is that if another creature that didn't have that particular configuration had got out of the primeval oceans and was able to breathe oxygen out of water first, then maybe we wouldn't have such dire ENT problems or get pneumonia and coughs and so on...
I like that idea. For about ten seconds I had thought about writing a novella based on the notion that human beings never developed eyes (or at least eyes that could detect anything other than light). Since human development and science is nearly entirely based on vision (if you can't see the stars, or the sky, you don't really know that there's a world out ther further than you can walk). Then I thought that someone must have done this already, and I've got focus on getting the novel I have completed out there.
I dunno about human biological evolution, but I do believe that there is a story by HG Wells about a society of blind people isolated in a valley. The Country of the Blind. Their blindness was caused initially by a disease, and is now hereditary.
Anyway, at the moment, I am mulling the concept of my new TP Prize novel, trying to work out how the plot will go. I have, basically, two disconnected plots that I am trying to merge. Will be trying to do that for the time being...
