Saturday, January 30, 2010

Evolution vs. Avatards

"Avatards" is courtesy of my favorite tech news source The Register -- pretty much Slashdot meets Monty Python, with Playmobil figures thrown in.

Anyway, my wife and I saw "Avatar" in 3d a couple of weeks ago. Very pretty movie, and the pacing was good. The 3d I found more of a distraction than a feature. Over 50 years of putting myself in movieland, I'm pretty good at it. I think we all are -- evidence of the youth and malleability of the human psyche. Having movieland come out of the screen at me seemed to break my concentration, to break the spell. I suspect that it wouldn't take much practice to get used to 3d tho. This was the 1st 3d I had seen since something at a (children's science?) museum years ago.

As many others have commented, the plot was nothing new: "Ferngully The Last Rain Forest", "Dances With Wolves", "The Last Samurai", etc. I found it interesting tho to examine the biology of the planet. If we're talking biology, we're talking evolution.

Q: How would a planet with a basically a single, interconnected nervous system evolve?

A: It wouldn't.

There had obviously been heavy duty evolution going on: look at the hunting packs (wolves), the large solitary predator (tiger), the large ruminants. When exactly would "nature red of fang and claw" have taken the time to let different species connect their nervous systems?

This guy totally nails the answer: Pandora is a post-singularity world. A global nervous system would have to be ... intelligently designed.

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