beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2009-04-02 03:00 pm
beccatoria) wrote2009-04-02 03:00 pm
Entry tags:
BSG: Daybreak Motivational Posters
Okay so this week I've been totally without work which is irritating since I went through such angst to clarify my damn hours (I'm supposed to have three days a week), but they're shifting me between projects and the new one was supposed to be kicking off Wednesday except apparently not so I'm stuck with no work 'til Monday. Which isn't exactly horrific except I'm broke and could have done with the cash and am now in a weird interim am-I-on-the-dole-or-aren't-I? situation. But whatever...y'all aren't exactly interested in that.
What y'all are probably interested in is the fact that, driven by boredom, and the inability of my mind to quite comprehend the hilarious fail of the post-Earthfall Daybreak stuff, I have responded in the only sane way I can think of.
Yay!
Honestly I feel a little mean about the Leetopia one and the Agriculture one because everyone seems to agree that Farmer!Gaius was the most moving thing in the episode, and I'm one of three people on the internet who really didn't see Lee's ending as a total tragedy. I mean, the part where he got far more idealistic than smart and threw everything INTO THE SUN was a tragedy, sure. But look at him in that field! He's so happy! And kind of...free. Looking forward. Sure it would have been nice if that had happened with a metaphorical moving away from Kara and his Dad rather than them turning into invisible pigeons and necrophiliac hermits, but whatever, I WANTED TO HUGGLE HIM.
Ahem.
Redacted.
What y'all are probably interested in is the fact that, driven by boredom, and the inability of my mind to quite comprehend the hilarious fail of the post-Earthfall Daybreak stuff, I have responded in the only sane way I can think of.
Yay!
Honestly I feel a little mean about the Leetopia one and the Agriculture one because everyone seems to agree that Farmer!Gaius was the most moving thing in the episode, and I'm one of three people on the internet who really didn't see Lee's ending as a total tragedy. I mean, the part where he got far more idealistic than smart and threw everything INTO THE SUN was a tragedy, sure. But look at him in that field! He's so happy! And kind of...free. Looking forward. Sure it would have been nice if that had happened with a metaphorical moving away from Kara and his Dad rather than them turning into invisible pigeons and necrophiliac hermits, but whatever, I WANTED TO HUGGLE HIM.
Ahem.
Redacted.
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If it helps I think the implication that a lot of the others didn't make it is implicit because they just gave up their only advantages in a very harsh environment and giant sloths and mountain lions are probably going to eat them as their crops fail, but the Hera as mitochondrial Eve thing doesn't actually suggest anything about the number of Colonials who made it or not.
Mitochondrial Eve isn't actually responsible for our entire genetic make-up she's just a hypothetical (and in BSG apparently literal) historical person who happened to win the lottery and is every one of our ancestors in a direct materilineal (mother to mother to mother to mother, etc.) line of descent. Obviously in the BSGverse it's Hera because it was fated to be, but in reality, Mitochondrial Eve is just...the winner of a very large random genetic lottery. It doesn't mean no one else from that era has living descendants, just that at some point in the intervening 150,000 years, there was a male in the line of descent and so their unique mitochondrial DNA was lost because you always get that from your mom.
Which also means that Hera got it from Athena and so we all have Cylon mitochondrial DNA. Which is also cool.
HOWEVER, the tag at the end of show explains Mitochondrial Eve incorrectly anyway (saying she's simply our most recent common ancestor, rather than matrilineal common ancestor; our most recent common ancestor probably lived only a few thousand years ago). So LORDS ONLY KNOW what RDM meant it to imply. :/
And um, now I'm hoping that made any amount of sense and that the copy of "The Seven Daughters of Eve," that my mother has left in our bathroom for the last few months and random wiki articles hasn't left me completely brain-addled and incorrect. o_O
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This. This is what ticks me off. Because it didn't have to be like that. And the only way the writers could MAKE it like that was by forcing 39,000 people to experience a mass delusion which causes them to act in a deeply self-destructive way. It's lazy writing.
If you can't come up with organic reasons to have a plot twist, the answer is not to write the twist anyway and just have people behave stupidly, the answer is to go back to the damn drawing board and start looking at different possible endings. And they've been doing this ever since season 2.5, so heaven only knows why I'm SURPRISED here. I should've given up on this show a long time ago.
Actually, I know exacdtly when I should've made a clean break from the show. After watching that scene in "Epiphanies" where the "Demand Peace" guy strolls across the Galactica flight deck, accompanied by armed Marines, toting a suitcase he didn't have when he came onboard. Because if the writers want to have a plot twist where Gina & Co. get hold of Baltar's nuke, they damn well have to work for it.
I'm not opposed to Gina getting the nuke (and they actually did a good job in that ep of showing how Baltar's hurt pride got the better of him), I'm just opposed to the writers not bothering to come up with a plausible way to get it to her. Hell, they could've cut that stupid, wretched scene altogether and just added a line in the final scene to say that the peace party's contacts on Galactica had helped Baltar smuggle a mysterious package to Gina.
The fact that they came up with such an incredibly unlikely scenario suggests that they just didn't CARE about its plausibility, only about its "cool" factor. But, you know, I figured every show makes mistakes and has lousy episodes, Epiphanies was just a blip. But then the show KEPT doing that stuff.
but the Hera as mitochondrial Eve thing doesn't actually suggest anything about the number of Colonials who made it or not.
Mitochondrial Eve isn't actually responsible for our entire genetic make-up she's just a hypothetical (and in BSG apparently literal) historical person who happened to win the lottery and is every one of our ancestors in a direct materilineal (mother to mother to mother to mother, etc.) line of descent. Obviously in the BSGverse it's Hera because it was fated to be, but in reality, Mitochondrial Eve is just...the winner of a very large random genetic lottery.
Sorry, I should've been more clear. I knew that already, and have in fact read The Seven Daughters of Eve. Have you read Stephen Oppenheimer's book, "The Real Eve"? (outside of North America published under the title "Out of Eden". Maybe the NA publishers thought the original title would scare off the fundie crowd or something). That one's really good also, and rather more comprehensive than Sykes's book, simply because he's going all the way back to Africa. Definitely worth reading if you enjoyed Sykes.
Anyway, Hera as mt Eve is the small consolation in the huge pile of suck, but my anger about the rest of the Colonials and Cylons probably being wiped out quite rapidly was actually based on the realities of life in the Pleistocene with no technology and no generations of inherited knowledge to improve your survival chances. I just didn't explain myself very well.
being long-winded here
It doesn't mean no one else from that era has living descendants, just that at some point in the intervening 150,000 years, there was a male in the line of descent and so their unique mitochondrial DNA was lost because you always get that from your mom.
Just to be all nitpicky, that sentence should read "there was ONLY a male in the line of descent." i.e. A woman in a certain lineage either only had sons, or her daughters didn't survive to have female offspring of their own and pass on her mtDNA.
HOWEVER, the tag at the end of show explains Mitochondrial Eve incorrectly anyway (saying she's simply our most recent common ancestor, rather than matrilineal common ancestor; our most recent common ancestor probably lived only a few thousand years ago). So LORDS ONLY KNOW what RDM meant it to imply. :/
Yeah, trying to figure out what RDM meant to put in a script as opposed to what the viewers actually saw is an exercise in deep frustration. Generally speaking, I go for the simplest explanation (mostly because even in its heyday, subtlety was never this show's strongest point). Also, given all the other stuff that's happened over the past few years on the show, where fans desperately tried to find an alternate explanation to the obvious one, only to find out from a podcast that the obvious (though very stupid) explanation was exactly what RDM had intended.
Where was I? Given RDM's track record, I'm assuming that either he didn't realise that agriculture was a very recent invention, or he figured the fans wouldn't check up on it and would take it at face value.
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But...that was never what bugged me so much. I'm more forgiving of a real aesthetic even if it crumbles under real scrutiny. I loved the New Caprica arc and I also loved the Final Four and Crossroads, and pretty much everything through Revelations.
In some ways, I'm lucky, because I got three and a half seasons of pretty much feeling the show was excellent. In other ways, it's so much more of a horrible shock to the system to watch it negate everything that was great about itself in such a tiny space of time. Blargh.
Also, awesome, you have read these things! I'm sure you know much more about it than me then. I've only read part of the book so far because, well, like I said, it's my mom's and I found it (and yes, started reading because of Hera! Though I also love this type of stuff.) I'll keep an eye out for "Out of Eden."
Just to be all nitpicky, that sentence should read "there was ONLY a male in the line of descent." i.e. A woman in a certain lineage either only had sons, or her daughters didn't survive to have female offspring of their own and pass on her mtDNA.
Okay, thanks for the correction.
But can I ask a question (to make sure I'm understanding correctly) because you've actually read about this! If that woman had sons and then those sons had daughters, that'd still be okay, right? Because those granddaughters would be getting their mtDNA from their maternal grandmother?
Similarly I wasn't aware it had to happen in the first generation? So in theory, Jane the Colonial could have a direct line of mother-daughter descent for six generations, but then that girl - her last matrilineal descendant, has only sons/no children at all?
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Similarly I wasn't aware it had to happen in the first generation? So in theory, Jane the Colonial could have a direct line of mother-daughter descent for six generations, but then that girl - her last matrilineal descendant, has only sons/no children at all?
Nope. Well, the kids would be fine, but the mtDNA lineage would have died out. Which is not to say that the grandmother's actual lineage would've died out, but it couldn't be tracked genetically anymore. Because everything except Y chromosomes (in men) and mtDNA (in everybody) gets reshuffled every generation, there's no way of tracking anything except mother's-mother's-mother's-mother's-mother and father's-father's-father's-father beyond a few generations.
If scientists dug up my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side and were lucky enough to find usable DNA in the remains, they could establish that we were related in two ways: through mtDNA (actually, mtDNA probably wouldn't be very useful, because four generations isn't very long by mtDNA standards), and through regular genetic testing. If you go much further back than that, even if you have usable DNA, regular genetic testing won't tell you much because the reshuffling each generation has diluted the genetic inheritance so much. And that reshuffling (which is good for us, because it allows for beneficial mutations etc. We're not just clones of the previous generation), is why geneticists have glommed onto mtDNA and Y chromosomes, because they don't get reshuffled.
But it's very easy for a lineage to die out, because this stuff is, as you say, a genetic lottery. And it only takes one generation. With my maternal great-great-grandmother, clearly she had at least one daughter (my great-grandmother, who gave birth to my maternal grandmother). My maternal grandmother had two daughters: my mother and my aunt. But for mtDNA purposes, my aunt doesn't count because she has no daughters, any more than my uncles count, even though they both have daughters. The lineage goes from my maternal grandmother to my mom, and then to my sister and me. But if neither my sister nor I have children, or we only have sons, game over for the mtDNA lineage. My little brother and his girlfriend could produce hundreds of fat babies (and make my mom very happy, because she desperately wants to be a grandmother, and my lack of maternal instinct frustrates her). But none of those fat babies would have my mom's mtDNA.
So yeah, mtDNA can die out in one generation. However, it's not always immediately obvious that it will die out. From a genetic POV, until my sister and I have both hit menopause, there's always the possibility that we could have daughters. Or my sister could have a whole whack of daughters, but none of them survive to/choose to pass on their genes (because they're just as un-maternal as me). The only way you know for sure that a lineage will definitely die out is if a woman has been through menopause, and of her grown-up children, only sons have survived to adulthood.
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The real mitochondrial Eve (who is purely hypothetical. Her existence is logically inferred. We haven't found any convenient remains, because sad to say, planet Earth is not ACTUALLY a television show). I lost my train of thought. The real mitochondrial Eve is unique because of all the women alive at the time (and, granted, there was a massive population contraction approximately 140,000 or 150,000 years ago, so mitochondrial Eve was probably one of only a few thousand candidates), she had at least two daughters who:
a) survived to adulthood
b) had daughters of their own
c) migrated in different directions.
So let's say that mitochondrial Eve's eldest daughter was the adventurous type, and went north. Second daughter was more of a stay-at-home type, and stayed put in Africa. Subsequently, daughter #1 had several daughters, and all of them went in different directions (clearly, successful mtDNA transmission depends on very loose emotional bonds between sisters!). Hence the fact that everybody from Swedes to indigenous Australians can all be traced back to that woman in Africa whose daughters and granddaughters all had a terrible case of wanderlust. The lineage is much less likely to die out if the daughters, granddaughters, etc. live in different geographical areas, because if some calamity befalls one group (volcano, disease, whatever), there are still other candidates elsewhere. Spreading the risk, you might say. In other words, clearly, Hera Agathon's tendency to run away at every opportunity was part of what made her lineage so successful!