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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> The xenomorph’s multicellular structure serves as a cornerstone for its classification within Animalia (Ros-Rocher et al., 2021). Its intricate organization of cells, tissues, and organs reflects a level of biological complexity commonly associated with animals.

This is already wrong! Animalia is an Earth kingdom, and the Xenomorphs clearly aren't an Earth life-form.

> Xenomorphs can be included into the Arthropoda phylum due to the morphological similarities shared with certain terrestrial arthropods such as an exoskeletal structure, a segmented body plan, the presence of hemolymph, etc.

Again, no! They're not an Earth life-form. Just because they superficially resemble some arthropods in some features doesn't make them an arthropod! You might as well say that a train is an arthropod - exoskeletal structure, segmented body plan, the presence of hemolymph...

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>This is already wrong! Animalia is an Earth kingdom, and the Xenomorphs clearly aren't an Earth life-form.

Is it if the engineers seeded earth with life?

It would have needed to be way back in single-cellular prehistory to be compatible with known history. They still wouldn't be the same phylum.

Never mind that xenomorphs aren't even carbon-based.

The elephant in the room is it's a silicon organic organism. So during parasitic stage it grows basically ex nihilo, and then hunts and eats carbon life forms for no reason. It's hollywood zoology.

There appears to be a misunderstanding in this thread.

The xenomorphs are not silicon-based.

In Alien, Ash (the android) notes that the facehugger utilizes utilize silicon-based processes to replace its outer layer...he specifically calls out the "interesting combination of elements". [1] It wouldn't be necessary to call out the use of silicon for the outer layer if the entire organism was silicon-based.

Also, it's clear that the xenomorphs utilize carbon-based food to grow baby xenos. In Alien, the host complains of starving before the baby pops out of his chest. Moreover, humans lack sufficient quantities of silicon for a baby xeno to grow in a human. In David's lab (Alien: Covenant), David's notes and experiments also indicate a duality to the creatures, and also that they are not strictly organic lifeforms, but are a fusion of organic and non-organic life...which is part of his fascination with them.

[1] In the novelization of Alien, Ash goes even further, stating that they facehugger is both carbon-based and silicon-based.

> eats […] for no reason

Honestly, same

They don’t eat humans generally. They did eat a guy in one of the later ones. But the better thought out films don’t have them doing this. Just killing or paralyzing things and then taking them back to the nest.

As far as I'm concerned, 3 and 4 never happened. I'm still on the fence about Prometheus and Covenant.

The prequels are cool

Haven’t seen the new one*

I haven't seen Covenant or Romulus yet. I saw Prometheus, and it was really bad, but in a complicated way. It wasn't a completely terrible movie that you can just dismiss as garbage like Battlefield: Earth and not think about again. It was beautifully shot, and a visual feast to watch. There were some really great scenes, like the robo-surgery scene. But the characters were frequently stupid, and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie. Ridley should have known better, and should have done a better job making sure the script he was working with made sense, so I'm very disappointed with him. He didn't do this with the first "Alien" movie at all.

Then he apparently did it again with Covenant: I haven't seen this one yet, but what I've read says he didn't really learn his lesson from Prometheus, and made another great-looking movie with high production values and a poor script. So I haven't been in a hurry to see it.

Romulus seems to have good reviews so far, and a different director, so I'd like to give it a chance. I just haven't had a chance to see it yet, but it is high on my list of films to watch soon, along with the new Quiet Place movie.

I feel the same way about Prometheus, lots of interesting ideas and memorable sequences that are beautifully shot but aren't connected together in a coherent way leaving the motivations of characters unintelligible by the end.

I watched Romulus recently and its kind of just a fan service film with a few utterly ridiculous sequences. The only things that really offended me where the heavy nerfing of facehuggers and the controversial CGI character who looked bad. Mostly it was just kind of forgettable but started out pretty good.

I think covenant made more sense story wise than Prometheus. Romulus basically doesn’t have a story.

I agree with the criticisms. I still think they’re fun. Prometheus is better than convenant.

> and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie

I took it as a meta-commentary on how humanity degrades with time. ("Idiocracy"-style.) Remember these clowns were supposed to be the cream of Earth's human crop.

Were they? I remember some people defending the plot, saying quite the opposite, that these clowns were actually a bunch of barely-competent losers who had little to lose by signing a contract to go on this voyage, because the cream of Earth's human crop would never have gone on this mission (the mission's nature was secret and no one had any idea why they were going to that planet, nor that Peter Wayland himself was aboard). This explanation still strains credibility in my opinion (even barely-competent contractors should be smarter than this, like the biologist who takes off his helmet when he sees an alien lifeform), but at least it's something.

If humanity was really degrading with time, they wouldn't be able to build such fantastic FTL spaceships, robotic surgery pods, etc.

Depends on your philosophic position on taxonomy. If you wish for it to capture inheritance and lineage, then I agree, but it is equally valid to view it as a relationship of similarities and patterns (similar to design patterns in programming). The lineages may have different origins, but if they converge on a common pattern, why shouldn't they be grouped together? (if it quacks like a duck...)

We can definitely group them, but if we want to pretend they are the same phylum, that will be a move going against the consensual meaning of the term in biology, which clearly distinguish analogous structures and homologous structures.

At this point, it’s clear that yes we can say whatever fantasy we want, but that is not going to instantly override the precise preponderant meaning it has gained in the community most interested and knowledgeable in the topic.

All that said, I’m not a biologist, and given the honesty I show with such a disclaimer, you know you can blindly trust me on all the topics I’m barely conscious about, right? So trust me xenomorphs are actually adorable cute cuddly pets. Don’t believe all you see in your nightmarish block busters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)

https://www.thoughtco.com/analogy-vs-homology-1224760

Also, doesn't the chemical merely mutate the existing DNA, so that a phlogeny based on sequence composition would yield high consensus for existing organisms (albeit with way higher than base rate variants)?

> This is already wrong! Animalia is an Earth kingdom, and the Xenomorphs clearly aren't an Earth life-form.

Has biology even bothered to come up with a name for that level of taxon, or would it be premature? I know that in recent years they've been quibbling about both what the top-level (Earth top-level) taxon should be, and what the specific ones would even be for it, but I've never heard of a scheme that embiggens it to alien life. If they ever did so, would there even be the same number of sub-taxons for it for any given planet?

And what in the hell do we do if we discover one of those on Earth? There's no reason to be certain that life only abiogenically manifested once on Earth is there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

Things evolve into crabs all the time

I don’t know if we specially have a word for that form of mistake in the tree. I’m under the impression we just fix the tree as we go.

In science fiction you pretty much have to accept either a single source of life or amazing convergent evolution. How can Vulcans mate successfully with humans in Star Trek, if they aren't animals very closely related to Homo sapiens? Or the humans in Star Wars that lived "long ago in a galaxy far far away".

And in both Star Trek and Star Wars, the answer eventually given somewhere in the lore is that a very long time ago someone seeded the entire galaxy with (humanoid?) life and it is all in a single tree. (See https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Progenitor and https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Celestial/Legends#Architect... )

Chimps, gorillas, and humans are very close in the genetic tree, but cannot cross-breed. For a high level of genetic compatibility, constant contact and cross-breeding are likely required.

It is actually not clear whether chimp/human hybrids are impossible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee

It’s possible it was actually going to happen if not disrupted in China during the cultural revolution

> and it is all in a single tree

That seems to apply to the Star Trek one, which going by the lore seems to be more of an artificially maintained rotten stump that had any potential for divergent/adaptive growth preemptively cut.

The Star Wars lore you link only seems to talk about empires that made contact with multiple species and might have helped spread them over a hundred thousand year span. It does not seem to mention a single point of origin or an artificially crippled evolution that would enforce parallel development.

Or you don't have to accept either - authors don't need to canonize a theory of biogenesis within the world they build to tell compelling story.

"How can Vulcans mate with Humans" doesn't need to be explained if the compelling part of the story is "how does the child of a human and Vulcan navigate both worlds and what does that tell us about ourselves." Of course, you could write a story where a shared or divergent biological/geological past was a part of the metaphor/allegory - but Star Trek doesn't need that.

And if Star Wars replaced the "galaxy" part of that sentence with "kingdom" and all the space ships with wooden ones no one would even need to ask the question, because Star Wars is as much fantasy as science fiction.

There are certainly some creatives who go that far, but I personally take issue with the necessity of detail and depth in scifi worldbuilding. It's really a recent phenomenon that audiences expect so much out of creators and I think it hurts the stories we tell.

Yes, yes, like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song "If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, and other science facts, then repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax."

I think you're missing the entire point of the article. It's attempting to classify a fictional, alien species with a real taxonomy (the only one we currently have available to us).

And yes, "just because they superficially resemble some arthropods in some features doesn't make them an arthropod".. but at the very beginning they point out they cannot use DNA sequences to help classify, so they are only using known physical characteristics.

Oh, I know the point. I'm just engaging in the same kind of nerd pedantry!

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