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Yes but they evolved because they had different requirements to survive. A Zoanthrope and a Venomthrope both live in the same habitat and have the same food (everything), meaning they should evolve in similar paths.

There are hive insects which have different body forms for different purposes. Some of them are unable to feed themselves and are fed by workers.

Another possibility is that the Tyranids may not be a single species. They might be a group of species living in some kind of symbiotic relationship, all controlled by the Hive Mind.

Think of the example of humans, who control cattle, horses, dogs, birds and fishes of different types. The ultimate purpose is to improve human life, however the side effect is that the animal species are protected from predators, disease and food shortages.

1.- In my opinion, Tyranids could be an extragalactic specie of creatures wich were insectoids, and something like a galactic catastrophe radiated their homeworld, and made them evolve as they do.
2.- They could be, at the very begginins, hard, exoesqueleted creatures with many limbs. They could be something similar to Alien, or to our insects.
3.- I'm not sure, but if that kind of conexion exist naturally (created by evolution), it can be something similar to the neural web wich trees have in Pandora ("Avatar" film), but extended to brains. In my opinion, neural conexions are something wich all Tyranids have, so when lots of them are together, their little minds merge and create a very intelligent Hive Mind.
That's my opinion. Good thread.

wizerdree wrote:

Klawz wrote:What evolutionary link could the venomthrope have with a zoenthrope, besides both being able to float (but even then the venomthrope uses a system of bladders, and the zoenthrope uses physic might)

the same thing that links all arachnids. One developed psychically and levitates itself, the other developed physically and floats.

But the venomthrope doesn't have any physic abilities, and it has no synaptic connection. The two creatures have nothing, evolution-wise, to do with each other besides both being tyranids. Why share a suffix?

Klawz wrote: Why share a suffix?

Xenobiologists are high, all the time.

4M2A wrote:Yes but they evolved because they had different requirements to survive. A Zoanthrope and a Venomthrope both live in the same habitat and have the same food (everything), meaning they should evolve in similar paths.

Well, biovores and zoenthropes share habitats and the same food, so why didn't they evolve similarily?

Your misunderstanding my point I am saying they haven't evolved naturally because they are different. Evolution only works if creatures breed normally if they are created by breeding pools then they are evolving in a different way. Because evolution requires the surviving individuals to pass on their DNA. Tyranid armies can evolve even if the last wave was entirely wiped out. This suggests that they are conciously learning then bioengineering rather than evolving.

It is not the creatures in a Tyranid army which survive and breed the next generation.

So evolution by the normal mechanism of survival of the fittest is not operating.

Klawz wrote: Why share a suffix?

GW is lazy and made several names in the new codex by swiping bits from the older creatures, unrelated or not. 'Oh, zoanthropes are floaty things, and this is a vaguely similar shaped floaty thing, so it shall be a thrope too!'

to be fair i think you lot are getting confused with the nids recent evolution (controlled) and what could of been their original evolution (a long long long time ago in a galaxy far far away lol). they might of started off as bugs, got bigger and evolved into something like the xenomorphs and then "diversified". the nids we've got today are the end product of a lot of evolution. as for the thrope, maybe it refers to their basic skeletal structure or base genetics?

And isn't bioengineering just a different form of "evolution" same way modern man is a lot different to medievil man (taller, bigger cranium, fatter etc etc)

Yes, I think bioengineering is a kind of evolution. You are putting genes in a different species to make it better, stronger and more adapted to survival. That is the main idea of natural selection.(survival of the fittest. thanks Charles Darwin!)

4M2A wrote:Yes but they evolved because they had different requirements to survive. A Zoanthrope and a Venomthrope both live in the same habitat and have the same food (everything), meaning they should evolve in similar paths.

Elephants and Gnu eat the same food...

Whatever ended up coming the hive we know today must have had a meddling helping hand somewhere to get to where it is. Maybe whatever the proto-hive mind ( like a tenuous collective of many simple small bug minds. It could be a evolutionary response to predators so they find it hard to infiltrate the hives territory) originally came from a highly hostile planet where adaptability is a must. It could have been a simple hive of very tough/adaptable insects. Look at other sci fi universes. The wraith started as bug-like creatures in stargate atlantis and became a galaxy wide threat. Same as mentioned with the aliens series xenomorphs (rumored to be at least ). As well as the zerg in starcraft ( probably the best to compare with ). This Hive of bugs gets experimented on for whatever reason. Things go too far and the gestalt hive mind comes into being after being made smarter. Then all hell breaks loose. Then you could have the very beginning of the hive fleet. Aeon's go by and the fleet for whatever reason decides it needs new galaxies to hunt in. Either to escape an even bigger threat to it or that it exhausts all decent biomatter in the home galaxy.

Pure speculation but thats what I feel could be plausible.

Thanks to restriction enzyme, we can cut, copy and paste DNA fragments like we would cut and paste text in a programming algorithm.

You dont see two-headed giant monsters being made right now mostly becose 1- Its illegual to playwith genes this way and 2- We still have very little knowlege of how to obtain a given complex phenotype (end result in the live thingy) out of an assembly of genetic sequences. We either do things that are simple, or trough trial / errors. But from the point the Tyrranids achieve sufficient intelligence, they can very much direct their evolution themselves toward what they want. If we were to just start messing with rangom genes just for the fun of it, we WOULD be able to create some strange, scary gak with the technology we aldredy have.

Miraclefish wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:Their method of life and reproduction is counter-survival. No predator species can survive by exterminating all its prey.

Never heard of locust swarms, then? They strip the landscape bare of very single piece of vegetation, food, refuse or dead matter, growing ever-larger and hungrier - stopping only when they run out of food or the winter freezes them to death.

Maybe that's why the Tyranids are so aggressive, the bigger they get, the more food they get. And the hungrier they are, the more desperate they are...

Locust swarms die out when they start to breed. Not by lack of food or winter. Also, they serve a very obvious role in nature, soil saturation, they collect biomass and eventually all die in roughly the same place, creating some very furtile soil. It's pretty much the same as Cicada's except for the "We eat anything" part...

So what you're saying is that the nids are the galaxy's super fertilizer? i'd prefer to think that they are a collection of species that co-evolved and are all led by some shared concioness,
i dont get why, as this is all made up of course, but still,
i am intrigued by the notion that they were a super bio weapon gone wrong

No he was saying that And thus the comparison isn't accurate.

As to how I like to see them?... mhhmm..

Ok Bug planet where they are the top predator (but not yet in an advanced form) Something Alien to the world crashes there wich releases a virus (or whatever) that sets the changes to the species in motion. The hive mind is born through the Cerebral growth in the overall species and still sees itself as top predator, only with a bigger playing field...

Archimus wrote:Thanks to restriction enzyme, we can cut, copy and paste DNA fragments like we would cut and paste text in a programming algorithm.

You dont see two-headed giant monsters being made right now mostly becose 1- Its illegual to playwith genes this way and 2- We still have very little knowlege of how to obtain a given complex phenotype (end result in the live thingy) out of an assembly of genetic sequences. We either do things that are simple, or trough trial / errors. But from the point the Tyrranids achieve sufficient intelligence, they can very much direct their evolution themselves toward what they want. If we were to just start messing with rangom genes just for the fun of it, we WOULD be able to create some strange, scary gak with the technology we aldredy have.

Not quite. Making the gene sequence is a lot easier than getting said gene sequence to work in an animal. Doing it from 'scratch' requires technology similar to cloning and that has a shockingly low success rate. We're talking hundreds of attempts to get a successful embryo when working with a species we're comfortable with fiddling with when it has normal gene expressions.

On a less serious note I think I've discovered the original Tyranid organism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gribbles

They seem to thrive in pretty much any climate conditions, eat anything ranging from algae to boats and are even called Gribbles, a sure predecessor to all things Gribbly.

The way the zerg, roughly the same concept, did it was to dig into other animals spinal cords and start to run them. This would explain why the nids have such a diverse look. Meaning, that some how the hive mind devoloped the ablity to control the breeding cycle and mesh speices to gether for a new one. The have done this here with the tyrant gaurds and ork dna in the fluf. The nids also look like lizards if you ask me, so the bio-engineered weapons makes more sense that naturally evolving and a bio weapon running amuck is already present in 40k.

Orkfantic wrote:The way the zerg, roughly the same concept, did it was to dig into other animals spinal cords and start to run them. This would explain why the nids have such a diverse look. Meaning, that some how the hive mind devoloped the ablity to control the breeding cycle and mesh speices to gether for a new one. The have done this here with the tyrant gaurds and ork dna in the fluf. The nids also look like lizards if you ask me, so the bio-engineered weapons makes more sense that naturally evolving and a bio weapon running amuck is already present in 40k.

More specifically, the Zerg were originally larvae-like creatures on the planet Zerus, a world where much of the suface is volcanic (magma-fields, ash-wastes, etc). The Xel'Naga (similar to the old ones of 40k) came in after their perceived failure to guide the Protoss to perfection, and engineered these Zerg to be even more resilient then they naturally were, and cultured an over-arching hive-mind (the Overmind) to control them all as one great big unit. The Overmind eventually revolted/over-through the Xel-Naga and forced the larval Zerg to develop the ability to burrow into/control the bodies of other species. The Zerg eventually developed primitive low-orbit flyers, and when a herd of large space-faring creatures (think giant whales, but in space) came near Zerus, the Zerg swarmed/took over said space-whales. The Zerg have since traveled from planet to planet, incorporating species/gene-pools that will be helpful to the greater swarm and eliminating everything else.

This seems most similar to what the Tyranids do.