Difference between revisions of "Talk:Draconic Taxonomy"

Revision as of 00:04, 16 June 2015

An nice article, interesting mixing of real world and the Temeraire canon. One small issue that I noted;

"The reverence with which the Chinese themselves regard these two breeds would prevent them from attempting to interbreed them with lesser Chinese dragons."

I don't think this is correct. I recall a passage in Throne of Jade that discusses the various Chinese breeds which mentioned that the highest ranking dragons in the Imperial administration might be "honoured" with an Imperial mating following years of good service. I admit that mating isn't the same as breeding, but the context of the paragraph that I recall would seem to suggest that as the intent. Andrew 06:10, 15 December 2008 (PST)

Oh, thank you! Yes, you're right. The reference seems to be specifically to the blue-grey Shen-lung:

"...the blue ones, most common, were engaged in the widest variety of tasks..." [ferrying humans, carrying loads of freight, on business as members of the civil service] Zhao Wei to Laurence: "The Shen-lung are like people, some are clever and some are lazy... Many superior breeds have risen from the best of them, and the wisest may even be honored with an Imperial mating."

I agree that it's fairly obvious that the intent of the mating is to produce offspring. Since the Chinese have presumably had this practice for some while, they would have noticed by now if such matings never produced offspring and stopped offering them. Rose 08:57, 16 December 2008 (PST)

There are a few assumptions made in this article which I think could stand to undergo a review.

The presence of air sacs practically demands draconic placement near therapods and avians in the evolutionary ladder. While hexapodism is novel in vertebrates, it is perhaps not so impossible; a duplication of the Hox genes regulating the forelimbs could produce a six-limbed reptilian, and from there evolution could adapt a limb into a wing (biologically speaking, six legs is nowhere near as useful or efficient as four, and likewise four hands are less energetically efficient than two). While I don't think sea serpents are an ancestral form, they may well be a sister taxon to dragons, with the split being at their common ancestor, a four-limbed crocodile-like creature that lived an aquatic or semi-aquatic lifestyle and thus had digital membranes which could readily be repurposed to flight. Spinosaurs seem an attractive ancestral family, especially given how many dragons have dorsal crests; they were semi- to fully aquatic and as therapods possessed all of the avian traits present in dragons. One branch duplicated their forelimbs and took to the land and later the sky, while another branch took to the water. Because of competition from both pterosaurs in the sky and other predatory dinosaurs on land, I believe that dragons did not radiate much until the K-T extinction 65 mya. Given the wide range of draconic characteristics, however, I believe it likely that this radiation event did happen around that time or perhaps a little later.

The principle is the assumption of endogamous sterility in the Celestials being due to genetic trait as opposed to a sense of propriety. When Lung Tien Qian explains the situation to Temeraire, while she states that they do not mate among themselves she notes that they are all too closely related without providing a suggestion that it's due to any sort of detrimental effect or infertility. Based on the available evidence, it would seem that Celestials arise from a recessive trait in the regulatory genes that is fairly widespread throughout a substantial plurality of the Imperial population. Another potential cause may well be a chromosomal duplication in the autosomes, as that could be easily passed down in the gametes as well as arising spontaneously in the Imperial population. As for the question of draconic species, while my own opinion lends me towards conservation (and recent intelligence gathered from Blood of Tyrants suggests that Kaziliks, at least, are close enough to Celestials to interbreed and produce viable offspring) and thus there is but a single species of dragon (being as they are not much more different from each other than individual breeds of dog are) interfertility does not put the question to rest.

While sterile hybrids are well-known, the species in the genus [1] are able to hybridize fairly freely between one another; indeed, most of the platyfish and swordtails found in pet stores are such hybrids and, as anyone who raised mixed-gender tanks of such livebearers can attest, are quite fecund into the second, third, and nth generations. Because of this, if we wish to classify dragons into species we ought to rely on characteristics other than their interfertility (or lack thereof) but rather their physical and behavioral characteristics. Solaris (talk) 00:04, 16 June 2015 (UTC)