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Good news:
Behavior change in minutes.
Secondary sex characteristics change in hours.
Total sex change, including gonads, in ten days.
Bad news:
We're talking about a fish.
But Professor Jenny Graves is studying it. Will she figure out how to induce the same changes in another animal, perhaps a human? Who knows?
But it would make great fodder for a story.
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-secrets-sex-changing-fish-reve...
Comments
He did
only to come back and find bones and his assistant Igor licking his lips and rubbing his belly going, "fishsticks, mmmm!"
Commentator
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Should Humanity Persist...
I wonder if, in 100 or 1000 years, if this present nonsense with the genders that humans has will simply fade away. I hope so, the whole idea has needlessly caused enough of us pain.
When I changed, it took 15 minutes to get rid of my male gonads. More than a decade to effect female deportment and speech. The surgery to make the best pseudo Vagina they could took a couple hours, that long because I insisted that they sterilize the shovel handle they stuffed up there really well. My breasts took a couple years, I think. I'm glad there were no implants.
Maybe all babies will come from test tubes and humans will have no gender?
Making it so that the species
Making it so that the species requires mechanical intervention to produce offspring is a non-survival characteristic. Hopefully nobody ends up being THAT stupid. (note that I said _requires_, not that it isn't done)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Survival of Homo Sapiens
I'm not sure that we should survive. Lots of almost humans, Neandertal, and Denisovans among them did not. We are the most brutal and ruthless predator alive. I hope that passes.
Other humans
Um, Neanderthals and Denisovians did not disappear completely. Almost all humans - Western based ones, at least, and that includes Indo-Europeans - have some amount of Neanderthal DNA in us, some have significant amounts. Certain peoples in East Asia are known to have Denisovian DNA as well.
Guess how it got there?
Penny
Cause...
... and effect. Unfortunately, that's how nature works. It's an automatic process. It also happens that even when one species overruns an almost identical species, intermating might occur on occasion, so it's not really surprising that Eurasians have some Neandertal DNA.
I want my nephews and nieces, and their future children, to survive and have happy lives and live in a humane, healthy world. I don't want them to die out.
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
I suspect it wasn't so much
I suspect it wasn't so much overrunning as it was that Homo Sapiens survived on more available foods. Neanderthal needed more meat in their diet, and Cro Magnon/Homo Sapiens Sapiens could manage on a heavier vegetable matter diet. BTW - they're pretty sure that most of our nasty venereal diseases come from Neanderthal, as they're older than they should be to develop with us. Just a weird factoid that I ran across recently.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Or...
A Skull Bone Discovered in Greece May Alter the Story of Human Prehistory
"... If so, things went differently during the later migration 70,000 years ago.
That wave of humans may have thrived outside Africa because they brought better tools. “If there’s an overarching explanation, my guess would be a cultural process,” Dr. Harvati said."
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
The Writer (and the Scientist) Did Seem...
...to sidestep the question as to the likelihood of two hominids, 40,000 years apart, falling into the same hole. Hard for me to imagine a geological feature of that type -- and one long gone now, since the remaining shards were embedded in a cave ceiling -- maintaining itself for that long even through a glacial advance that seems to have started 183,000 years back.
Eric
Neanderthals and Denisovans
I saw a video about them just a day or two ago. The paleontologists still aren't sure what killed them off.
While it is popular for the 'humanz are evil' and 'humanz are the greatest' crowds to speculate that we killed them off, the consensus seems to be that it is more likely that the cooling climate killed them off. We have only found small settlements, so it is likely that they were on the way out, anyhow.
But before they went, they left us some good genes. So, in a way, they are still here.
While it's easy to pay attention to all of the evil things that some humans do, it is better to look at the good. The media makes more money on bad news than on good, so that's what they show.
But there are lots of examples, big and small, about the goodness of humankind. Also, because of our efforts, by most measures, things are steadily improving. Things like infant mortality, life expectancy, educational opportunities, poverty, affluence, pollution, and the like. We may concentrate on the crappy things in the world, but the numbers show a steady improvement.
So I'm looking forward to watching (and participating in) humanity's spread throughout the Solar System and beyond.
And I'm looking forward to the time when we have the choice of inhabiting a body that was bio printed to our exact specifications, or an android body created to our specifications, or a virtual reality world (like World of Warcraft or Second life, but with full immersion.)
Persist
We're on the cusp of making new organs and other body parts by 3D printing them and other techniques. Eventually, we'll be able to do the whole body.
The first person to live to be 1000 years old may be in her 80s or 90s, though that will be the exception. My best guess is that if you make it for another ten to twenty years, you will be in the race between technology and aging. If you don't lose an organ before technology learns how to make a new one, you can keep going.
My 'Sweet Sixteen' stories are based on that premise.
20 years ago they said that
20 years ago they said that they'd be printing hearts in 10 years. They missed.
They _had_ used a bioreactor to create a cartilage rib cage for a boy who, for some reason, didn't have the ribs on one side of his body. That was when they boasted about how soon they'd be making other organs.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Timing
Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, or maybe not. In a lot of cases, I haven't been optimistic enough about our advancements. I thought that running computers at 600 MHz or so would be about it. I never thought that we would see 128 GB or 256 GB on a hard drive, let alone on a tiny little sd card.
I am disappointed that we don't have flying cars or electricity too cheap to meter, but the lack of those comes from our unwillingness to use nuclear energy, and our inability to move on to fusion.
But bio printing? I saw a TED talk on YouTube where a kidney was being printed in the background while the scientist was giving his talk. It was missing blood vessels and the like, but they are working on it.
And they have already implanted artificially made parts. They're continuing to work on more.
Oh, good lord. Flying cars
Oh, good lord. Flying cars are an abomination. People drive badly enough now, and they only have 2 dimensions to screw up in. Add a third one where people can break the law, and watch the cars falling out of the sky, smashing men, women, children, houses, and even the occasional lawyer.. I mean, cockroach. HORRIBLE idea.
Now, hovercars? That'd be better. Then you'd only need crabgrass 'roads', rather than concrete.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Three dimensions...
Instead of one.
Seriously, when you are on a road, your ability to avoid a collision is very limited. You often have to choose between a car and a ditch or tree.
But with three dimensions, you can go over or under or left or right.
Not that I expect that we will be directly controlling them in high traffic areas -- if at all. Autopilots have been around for decades. The reason they work is because they don't have to navigate roads or dodge traffic.
In the olden days, the autopilots were quite simple and the real pilots had to take over as they approached the crowded airspace around an airport. Now, they are capable of taking the plane from runway to runway.
And air navigation systems are going to be used over crowded cities and the like. Big companies like Amazon dot com have put lots of money into their drone research and development, and they have lots of political punch.
So it's just a matter of time.
By the way, even without automatic navigation, the flying cars would have HUDs with the 'roads' in the air. If you stay on the road and properly change from one to the other, you won't crash. It would be at least as safe as ground cars.
Already did
Didn't Beverley Taff write a story with almost that premise? I recall that it wasn't a fish that did it but another marine creature.
Ah, yes, Sacculina.
Penny
Ten or Twelve Stories
There are only ten or twelve TG stories, plus window-dressing to make us think we're reading something new.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Clown fish
enemyoffun wrote The Unusual Clownfish.
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/49303/unusual-clownfish
There actually is a story like that.
It is about a lady who studied a certain virus, that induces a similar change in a certain male Crab and then modified it to punish a rapist, who raped her friend. Can't remember where I read it, though.
Monique S
As Noted Above...
It's Sacculina, by Beverly Taff. It's unfinished, with six parts posted, the most recent of them last December.
Eric
i feel like bugs bunny. . .
Don't do it, Tigger. Don't you do it!!!
DONT!'
Aw heck, I'll do.it. . .
[Ahem]
. . . Sounds fishy to me . . .
Warm furry hugs!
Tiggs
If I dood it I get a whoopin
I dood it!
Far enough in the future, who knows?
Technology and understanding of genetic manipulation may eventually reach the points where parthenogenesis or asexual reproduction are viable options. Heck... Homosexual reproduction might someday be possible, and fun, too.