[Wilshire]

Regarding the Tracery and the Whale-Mothers.

First, the Tracery seems a pretty lame test of intellectual acuity. On the surface, its great. Only the most brilliant and fastest mental processors will be able to pin a leaf under a spinning coin. That's crazy.
However, once you get older and your reflexes dull, the mind clouds, that doesn't make you're genes less viable. I would expect something more elegant.
Important for later, but its mentioned that the ones that don't breed are sent into the mines to do manual labor - excavating the Thousand Thousand Halls.

The whole Whale-Mothers scene was very disturbing Thoughts of mine from another thread

Brings up Whale-Mothers. Why would men be selected for physical and mental acuity and women selected for being giant whales? The only reason I can come up with is because the Dunyain needed to breed as much and as frequently as possible. Shorter generations means less time to breed the intellectual acuity to become a self moving soul. This can be achieved in several ways:
Breeding at younger ages. The early a woman can bare children, the more children she can have.
The older she can still bare viable children, the she can have total in her lifetime.
Shorter time period between birth and the next pregnancy
Shorter time to reach full term baby. I'm not sure the mother affects this, but I'm guessing a healthy momma that gives neutrants to babies more quickly means the baby grows faster.

These things might have selected for large women with wider hips, lead to retaining more fat and nutrient stores, and potentially selected against intellect.
Sorry if my misunderstanding of biology and pregnancy are grossly inadequate.

It seems the decision was made to select, when breeding women, for those most capable of bearing children, and lots of them.  I imagine everyone, men and women, came to the consensus to select women's physical features for child bearing/rearing, and men's for physical fitness. However, they couldn't just stop selecting for intellectual acuity, otherwise they'd basically be canceling out the effects of what they were trying to breed into the men. That has interesting implications.

Did the dunyain males just brainwash all the women to consent to their role?
Did the women themselves consent without provocation? They might have been just as interested in obtaining the Absolute, and realized their role in the matter. Without them, it would have been impossible.
Maybe the women had their intellects artificially stunted at some point. It would be important to still only allow the most intellectually acute to breed, even among women. That means they'd have to be shackled/convinced/brainwashed/etc after they passed through the thousand thousand halls - or some other test just for intellect (as the TTH was also a physical test). With neuropuncture, this should be fairly trivial.


Aside from all that, I doubt they should really ever have been able to have such a difference between sexes, for much of the same reason that they couldn't just make all the women dumb and the men smart. Because they are breeding, those genes would get mixed together constantly. If the women were tending to get fat and big-boned, genetically speaking, then so too should the sons of those women. They all had to be bred to be smart and physically fit, so really the physical changes seen, other than perhaps wider hips, would need to be  induced phenotypically post-selection for breeding. Some difference in diet and exercise ...

[H]

Well, all this could be support for an idea I had during the Slog, which is, that what the Dunyain thought they were breeding and selecting for isn't actually what was really being selected, it was really just confirmation bias in action.  I am still of the mind that Dûnyain are really a hybrid race, a mix of Man and Nonman and the distillation of the Nonman blood is really what was going on, not the pushing of human limits.

In addition, there is also the fact that we have talked about before, how Kellhus' journey, especially at the begining seems to improbable.  Hell, he nearly dies to snow.  Perhaps the real selecting agent really is something from the Outside.  That all the breeding, all the training, was all just because something needed Kellhus, specifically.

Of course there is the chance that bad biology is just a thing in Eärwa.  That for whatever reason, genetic rules are real there, perhaps for the same reason that Gods are real, or damnation is real.

My guess though, from the text is that the women, at least at first, were willing to submit to being "bred according to the fitness of their progeny."  Additionally, "over the centuries, the sexes were transformed," he said, "each according to their share of our burden."

To me, putting these pieces together, I get the feeling that the Dûnyain had no real idea what they were doing with genetics.  They were simply guessing what combinations could possibly be best.  In other words, since they couldn't make sense of the permutations (or at least, they probably thought they couldn't, because it seemed too random) that come with sexual reproduction.  Either that, or they really didn't want to be bothered, instead they would rather have removed the "trouble" of sexual politics all together.

It kind of goes to something that Kellhus says:

“Men,” Kellhus said, “cannot dominate their hunger, so they dominate, domesticate, the objects of their hunger. Be it cattle …”
“Or women,” she said breathlessly.

So, this was probably where Kellhus gets the idea from, the Dûnyain had done it.  They had dominated and domesticated the women, to the point of them basically not being human any more.

Indeed, this explains why there were still defectives (and seemingly commonly) and why they bred so young.  Because they were just forcing generation after generation, constantly, until something (someone) came out right.  Until some specimen was essentially all their father and almost none of their mother.

Plausible?

[Wilshire]

Yeah I accept "Earwa biology doesn't work the same as Earth biology".

And, though I haven't participated in the Slog much since TTT, I have had similar thoughts for a long time - or at least I agree that they might have accidentally/purposefully been selecting for Nonmen traits. Could be that the Dunyain women look exactly like Nonmen women.

Puzzling out the intricacies and permutations of sexual reproduction would be exceedingly difficult without any of the tools to actually see it take place. So maybe they were just guessing and hoping.
Then again, Kellhus determined that what was brought up out of Virri was a nuke, or at least something that would cause mass destruction and subsequent sickness, in a matter of second. We've seen that the Dunyain have an almost comical level of inductive reasoning skills.


Turning their women into mindless child-bearing cattle, assuming its possible, is just so disturbing to me. You'd have to be not quite human...

[H]

Yeah I accept "Earwa biology doesn't work the same as Earth biology".

And, though I haven't participated in the Slog much since TTT, I have had similar thoughts for a long time - or at least I agree that they might have accidentally/purposefully been selecting for Nonmen traits. Could be that the Dunyain women look exactly like Nonmen women.

Puzzling out the intricacies and permutations of sexual reproduction would be exceedingly difficult without any of the tools to actually see it take place. So maybe they were just guessing and hoping.
Then again, Kellhus determined that what was brought up out of Virri was a nuke, or at least something that would cause mass destruction and subsequent sickness, in a matter of second. We've seen that the Dunyain have an almost comical level of inductive reasoning skills.


Turning their women into mindless child-bearing cattle, assuming its possible, is just so disturbing to me. You'd have to be not quite human...

The strong seed forces the womb...
Her mother was proof of that.

So, they did believe that there was such a think as "strong" or "weak" seed.  Mind you, that is Mimara talking, but it does speak to an idea of how genetics were thought to work.

I just feel like, even for Dûnyain, the imperceptabilities of genetics would probably outside of what they could intuit.  There were two paths to walk then, either run two programs, essentially, to train both men and women, then breed the best of both, or train one and hope the other would be a "blank slate" of sorts.  In this sense, perhaps they actually got women to be born with no intellect at all, so that it would be carried by the male genetics altogether.  This again could explain why there were bunches of defectives, despite the evidence of a large number of generations.  In addition, this would explain Moe and Kellhus' high rate of defectives too.

[Wilshire]

Yeah that's fine assuming that's how it works in Earwa. You've got your 'female genes' and 'male genes' and no, or minimal, crossover. Like a more elaborate pairing difference that we've got here with XX and XY chromosomes... I blame nonmen gene intervention.

And H, you should go read Dune. There's another year before TUC. Get going.

[H]

Yeah that's fine assuming that's how it works in Earwa. You've got your 'female genes' and 'male genes' and no, or minimal, crossover. Like a more elaborate pairing difference that we've got here with XX and XY chromosomes... I blame nonmen gene intervention.

And H, you should go read Dune. There's another year before TUC. Get going.

Oh, I read Dune, just not any of the other books in the series.

Then again, that was probably 15 years ago?  Maybe more...

On the Nonman part, yeah, what they really wanted was the Nonman aspects to overwrite the Human ones where they could.  The defectives are probably where they overwrote them in the wrong places...

[Wilshire]

On the Nonman part, yeah, what they really wanted was the Nonman aspects to overwrite the Human ones where they could.  The defectives are probably where they overwrote them in the wrong places...

Maybe future pollution from Emwama genetics thrown in there with the Nonmen. The whole thing is a clusterf*ck of genepools.

[Blackstone]

Perhaps the whale mothers come from a separate line of breeding. One line of breeding is dedicated to physical and mental perfection while the other is to achieve physical characteristics required for the breeding program. Obvious defectives would be destroyed outright, while those that proved defective later in life could be used in other Dunyain experiments and to dredge the halls.

The whale mothers are one of the most disturbing parts of the book. It's odd that the Dunyain sat down and decided that they didn't need women to find the path to the absolute, but I suppose that fits with the "women are lesser souls" part of Earwa.

[H]

Well, Mimara tells us that women being "lesser souls" is a fact in Earwa, so if they wanted to walk the Shortest Path to the Absolute, it would have the be through the male soul, right?  It starts higher.

[Wilshire]

I considered a totally separate line for breeding, but then realized that at any point if you have crossover then it ruins everything. You'd never be able to cross breed the lines.
Could be that they kept that whole room explicitly for breeding defectives, but that doesn't really seem worth the effort.
I think 'not IRL biology' is what we're left with, and alien DNA/genetics/reproduction.

[H]

Well, Nonmen are sort of like aliens, right? 

[Blackstone]

I considered a totally separate line for breeding, but then realized that at any point if you have crossover then it ruins everything. You'd never be able to cross breed the lines.
Could be that they kept that whole room explicitly for breeding defectives, but that doesn't really seem worth the effort.
I think 'not IRL biology' is what we're left with, and alien DNA/genetics/reproduction.

Hmm. You make a good point. I concede.

[H]

It could be that the whale-mothers are even more Nonman than the rest, purposely...

[H]

I think 'not IRL biology' is what we're left with, and alien DNA/genetics/reproduction.

I sort of randomly had the thought that Kellhus being able to have "normal" daughters (I mean, non-whale-mother) could be support of either Eärwan biology just being different (daughters inherit their feminine traits from their mother) or the whale-mothers really being a separate species of some sort.

[Wilshire]

I think 'not IRL biology' is what we're left with, and alien DNA/genetics/reproduction.

I sort of randomly had the thought that Kellhus being able to have "normal" daughters (I mean, non-whale-mother) could be support of either Eärwan biology just being different (daughters inherit their feminine traits from their mother) or the whale-mothers really being a separate species of some sort.

If a fertilized egg was implanted into them, then their genes wouldnt be passed on. Its possible, but somehow I doubt it.