While it does say that there is no outwards difference in appearance between male and female Sranc that are readily apparent, this isn't the same as saying they are outwardly identical down to the genitalia.  It does mean that male and female Sranc will have the same height, build, and colouration.

I think it is downright silly to claim that "no outward differences are readily apparent" is compatible with "half of them don't have the thing that is their most prominent feature in almost every damn description we have of them".

I am the Sharmat. I am older than music.

So "batshit crazy" then?

My point wasn't that socialism promotes self-indulgent behavior, but rather that the society of the Progenitor's must've been in some sense socialistic since the obstruction of others and their desires is forbidden, which I interpret to mean that they are in a sense all equal citizens, which people aren't in capitalistic societies.

I think you're completely off-base here. A system where the only thing forbidden is obstructing the desires of others sounds more like Objectivism (or, I guess, LaVeyan Satanism) than anything else.

Not to mention, going anywhere near civilization when you're the most infamous frikkin' Wizard the Three Seas has ever known might be slightly hazardous to one's health. Oh sure, let's just walk into the Imperial Precinct in Momemn. I'm sure that will be fine.

I actually don't get why readers seem to want it to be Kelmomas so much.

Because it is narratively more 'neat and tidy' if Kelmomas is responsible for the deaths of all his siblings. That would also form a nice parallel to the No-God metaphorically 'killing' all of its 'siblings', the Gods. It just seems to 'fit' somehow.

Of course, that sort of 'neat and tidy' resolution would be completely at odds with how Bakker writes.

Even assuming that we one day reach a point where we could all rewire our own brains to just be amoral hedonists, what makes anyone think that any society would actually allow such a thing? We'd regulate it like we do with drugs. Some people will do the rewiring anyway, illegally, and most of those people will be caught (they'd be a heck of a lot easier to identify and catch than drug users) and forcibly rewired back to something resembling humanity, or at least something that's not dangeous to the rest of society.

I mean, societies are perfectly capable of collectively deciding that certain things that might seem beneficial/enjoyable to an individual are so destructive to society as a whole that they must be forbidden. That's the point of society.

To me, the fate of the Progenitors of the Inchoroi isn't a cautionary tale about the dangers of science and technology gone too far, but of the Randian 'Objectivist' flavour of libertarianism gone too far. The only way they could have ended up as they did is if they had already thrown out any concept of a society being able to set rules for its members before they reached the technology level required to rewire their brains.

I remember that line but I didn't put it together.  I remember the mention of the 100th stone, but I must have missed the skin-spy tripping entirely.  I thought it was just a throw-away sentence. 

It happens off-screen. The Serwe skin-spy returns to Cnaiur injured and says the boy knocked her over a cliff with a flung stone and escaped.

IIRC, Bakker has stated that the EG is deliberately incomplete and unreliable, because it is written from an in-universe PoV. It's meant to be something compiled by actual Three Seas scholars. It's possible that nobody working on it knew when Istriya really died, or even whether she was actually dead.

Having said that, Bakker has also acknowledged that there are things in the EG that were genuinely mistakes on his part.