Thoughts On Innovation

Bad Biology™ in Science Fiction

Every alien species and ecosystem in science fiction is by definition purely speculative. For the story to work the author makes it all up. This in itself is not Bad Biology™ in the same vein as Phake Physics™. In Phake Physics™, the author allows one or two impossible technologies or phenomena to exist such as Faster Than Light (FTL) travel or communications to allow the story to unfold as s/he wishes. It is entirely possible to write good Sci-Fi w/o violating the known laws of physics. To be sure, it puts serious constraints upon the storyline, but as a number of authors have shown, it is possible and still have a great story. I myself did this in my two published Sci-Fi novels. But even really solid writers of Sci-Fi who work to avoid too much Phake Physic™ very often blow it when it comes to biology, leading to Bad Biology™.

Perhaps some examples will help elucidate?

Larry Niven was one those authors who wrote hard sci-fi, sometimes allowing one or two impossible technologies, but otherwise kept to real physics. But in one of his story lines, he introduces the concept of the Ring World, an artificial habitat that literally girds a star with a ring that rotates faster than its orbital distance would dictate to create a centrifugal force to mimic gravity. But in so doing, he failed to note that such an object would be unstable. He got mocked and heckled for it by students at MIT who had performed the analysis. In response, Niven wrote a novel of a Smoke Ring around a star, in which a gas giant was leaking atmosphere sufficient to create a ring of gas in its orbital wake. Presumably, other planets in orbit around the star would “shepherd” the gas to contain it in the ring. All of this is solid astronomical physics.

But Larry Niven, despite having a minor in psychology, was primarily educated as a mathematician, not a biologist. When he very imaginatively populated his smoke ring with “integral trees”, a nod to his educational background, he correctly noted that there would be a differential orbital velocity of the gas leading to the tall/long trees experiencing tidal forces to align the trees along a radial from the parent star and also differential winds at the ends of the tree. So far, so good. But the odd Bad Biology™ phenomena was his imagined solution to the problem that was bound to occasionally occur in which the tree would venture too far from the densest region of the smoke ring, past the tree line so to speak. But his trees did a very UNLIKELY thing to save themselves, involving a symbiotic relationship with an insect like species that cut the trees in half, sacrificing half the tree to save the other half.

Why is this Bad Biology™, because evolution does not find the most complicated solution, but the most likely at each step along the way. Long before a plant would have evolved to be a tall tree, it would be a smaller plant, one that would have evolved far less expensive means of maintaining its position in the smoke ring, such as curling up its leaves on one end of the tree to cause differential drag in the differential wind to pull it back to denser air. Admittedly, this wouldn’t have allowed for as dramatic loss of human life as the poor souls who were on the wrong end of the tree in Niven’s story, but it would have been better biology.

Another example of Bad Biology™ I find even more egregious are the sand worms in Herbert’s Dune. A basic tenet of ecosystems is that each level lower in food chain must have a much larger total biomass than the one above. This is basic. Yet Herbert violates it in his description of Arrakis as a desert of mostly parched sand dunes, no vegetation. Quite simply, a single sand worm uses more energy traveling through the sand hunting for a single meal, than it could possibly get from such a meal, no lush vegetation to feed the thousands of large herbivores that such an apex predator would need to feed upon. Herbert has literally flipped the biomass pyramid on its head.

In Avatar, the ecosystem could not possibly have evolved naturally as described… as I’ve previously written about. It would have to have been a genetically engineered ecosystem including the intelligent “natives”, yet the film never once discusses this obvious issue.

In my own writing, having a very strong background in both physics and biology, I have sought to avoid such mistakes.

Further Reading:

Pandora is a GMO Ecosystem