OFF: Solaris

[M Holmes]

Guido Vacano writes:

> Erm, do molecular biologists qualify? :-) Even if your question is
> rooted in more "traditional" biology, I might be able to help.

OK, a game open to all anyway.

The idea was to set a story on a planet of aliens who were in some way
actually alien rather than just eggheaded or brutish humans. The
difficulty is of course how to set a narrative where some of the
characters can't be understood by the reader. My solution was to have a
human protagonist who is a detective, be called in to solve a murder on
the alien planet. He'd be unable to understand the alien thinking, but
would be able, in a Holmesian way, to work it out, and thus solve the
murder.

Which is where biology, and evolutionary psychology come in.  Humans
have male sexual jealousy, according to the evolutionary psychologists,
because the plumbing and methodology of mating means that males can't be
certain of paternity, and thus might waste considerable resources
raising a child not genetically theirs (human cuckoldry rate seems to be
running at 15% to 25% though cheap DNA tests might well change this).
The incest taboo comes from the dangers of double-recessive genes,
difficulties of sexual behaviour between siblings when child-rearing and
other problems which need to be circumvented.  So the basic idea of
evolutionary psychology is that emotions develop from some
economic/logistic problem in the organism's environment or life cycle.

So what I need is some peculiar breeding cycle of some organism which
could be logically extrapolated through similar reasoning into an
emotion in a sentient being which would be peculiar to understand but
which could be rationally arrived at by examining the life cyycle or
evolutionary history of the organism. It'd of course help if there were
some logical reason to keep it secret from others or other species (our
protagonism) a la incest and if it were clearly to be strong enough to
be a motive for murder.

Over to you....

FoFP