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 Boggy Man wrote:
I'm just surprised the Citadel artists think everyone would be white after 20.000 years of isolated breeding

Well, there are a few black people around in the official artworks. Not many, but there is at the very least one black seraphim. I know, because my AS army is only black sisters, so when some people question the canonicity (is that a real word ?) of it, I use this image as proof.

There's at least one Imperium planet from FFG where the humans have grey skin (and are not designated as mutants in any way for it, to my knowledge)

Poodles are highly intelligent, if I recall correctly (weren't they one of the top 3 smartest dog breeds?). Pretty sure they fight well too.

The reason everyone wouldn't be "hot" is because evolution doesn't work that way.

Traits which benefit reproduction or survival have the greatest chance to be selected for, for sure. Attractiveness would seem to be such a trait. But the truth is that attractiveness, to some degree, comes down to taste. What you consider attractive is controlled by cultural norms by and large. What is attractive varies from culture to culture, even on Earth, and in a place as diverse as the Imperium there is a lot of scope for differing cultural pressures. Culture also changes too rapidly for it to realistically be an agent of evolutionary change- there might be a selective pressure towards, for example, bigger buttocks, for a generation or two, but then it would likely fracture, and some new ideal of attractiveness would come forward. It is difficult to comprehend this because we are stuck in our own timeframe and the culture we have seems like it's been really constant for a long time, but in evolutionary terms it's an eyeblink.

Add to this, that the strongest selective pressures in any galaxy spanning empire are likely to be extremely local- varying radiation levels, gravitational pulls, dietary intakes and levels of predation from native life forms would all be much more stable and long lasting selective pressures for most colonists. Due to gene linkage, if the genes for less than pleasing symmetry and the genes with a mutation that, for example, helps the colonist to deal with a lower oxygen content in the air, or a higher solar radiation, or whatever, are located together, that means the likelyhood could be that "unattractive looks" could be selected for much more strongly than "attractive looks" just because of various founder effects and so on.

In short, genetics, natural selection and evolution are all much more complicated than they are generally thought to be!

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Blanche defined the aesthetic of 40k, supposedly. Part of me wishes that his modern successors remembered that.

Then I remember that I can only take his work in small doses, and that his fetish for high heels pisses me off. ><

I agree with this completely. The New stuff in general feels soulless and cheap

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Wyzilla, I am not referring to the people of modern 40k being able to get perfect genes. I am saying that their ancestors, as in the DAoT humans, did this sort of thing which would weed out the "bad" genes. I am just wondering why the humans, as depicted in art, aren't a bit better looking since they would have inherited this thinner gene pool. AFAIK, the time between the DAoT and now wouldn't be enough to massively reintroduce the "imperfect" genes.

Actually, they didn't. The early human colonies, created as Mankind spread through the stars, were often established by groups of people sharing some sort of commonality, whether that was ethnic (so you'd have Chinese colonies, Slavic colonies, Nigerian colonies, etc.), religious (so you'd have a world entirely populated by Mormons or Jesuits or FSM followers or members of the Church of the Sub-Genius), or from other interests (so a colony would all be members of KLAW, which is a Star Trek cos-player group who all act like Klingons, or they would all be Dr. Who fans, or Dungeons & Dragons players, etc.).

There's nothing to say that their genes are perfect.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Blanche defined the aesthetic of 40k, supposedly. Part of me wishes that his modern successors remembered that.

I can only thank God that his gak didn't spill into the Necron Codex

 Da Boss wrote:
The reason everyone wouldn't be "hot" is because evolution doesn't work that way.

Traits which benefit reproduction or survival have the greatest chance to be selected for, for sure. Attractiveness would seem to be such a trait. But the truth is that attractiveness, to some degree, comes down to taste. What you consider attractive is controlled by cultural norms by and large. What is attractive varies from culture to culture, even on Earth, and in a place as diverse as the Imperium there is a lot of scope for differing cultural pressures. Culture also changes too rapidly for it to realistically be an agent of evolutionary change- there might be a selective pressure towards, for example, bigger buttocks, for a generation or two, but then it would likely fracture, and some new ideal of attractiveness would come forward. It is difficult to comprehend this because we are stuck in our own timeframe and the culture we have seems like it's been really constant for a long time, but in evolutionary terms it's an eyeblink.

Add to this, that the strongest selective pressures in any galaxy spanning empire are likely to be extremely local- varying radiation levels, gravitational pulls, dietary intakes and levels of predation from native life forms would all be much more stable and long lasting selective pressures for most colonists. Due to gene linkage, if the genes for less than pleasing symmetry and the genes with a mutation that, for example, helps the colonist to deal with a lower oxygen content in the air, or a higher solar radiation, or whatever, are located together, that means the likelyhood could be that "unattractive looks" could be selected for much more strongly than "attractive looks" just because of various founder effects and so on.

In short, genetics, natural selection and evolution are all much more complicated than they are generally thought to be!

Ah, that is actually a good point Da Boss. I never considered the fact that "ugliness" survived in the gene pool for a reason. I assumed it was some sort of genetic anomaly that survived for whatever reason.

See, I wasn't really buying the "standards of beauty change" argument because there are parts of beauty that isn't dominated so much by societal pressures. Babies go for certain features that are considered attractive, for example. What I was getting at in the original post is that these features would be prominent in future humans because things like asymmetrical faces would have been bred out by artificial genetic selection. I suppose what I mean is that future actions of "designer babies" would be, if I remembering the term correctly, a genetic bottleneck. Has there been any research as to why features we consider unattractive remain in the gene pool?

@Furyou Miko
I find Blanche's artwork to be waaay too busy and strange for the most part. The only exceptions are his Imperial Navy artwork. That stuff is brilliant.

@Psienesis
Where is the source for this? I am genuinely curious since my impression of 40k is that the "Planet of Hats" thing that dominates most 40k worlds came about due to the colonists adapting to the environment instead of the other way around.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
True, very true, but there are parts of beauty that are linked to good genes like symmetry of the face, clarity of the skin and body shape. I would think that those items would be superior on future humans because of years of selective breeding. But, you are right, for all we know the humans of 40k are beautiful to the generation that designed their genetic code.

Except humans aren't being selectively bred now, nor are they in the 41st millennium.

Attractive qualities change over time and vary by culture even. Also, someone being "unattractive" doesn't mean they don't reproduce. We aren't removing "ugly" from the genepool.

Beauty standards here on Earth vary widely. Take the hundreds of standards of beauty we have today and multiply that by 100 million. You'll quickly find that there will be no uniform standard.

You might find a few planets that used selective breeding and/or eugenics, but they'll be a rarity.

I think the Imperium has bigger fish to fry than a case of the uglies...

 Da Boss wrote:
Traits which benefit reproduction or survival have the greatest chance to be selected for, for sure.

Famine and the ability to survive on food that other men can't process would be an extremely strong selector, for example. Consider us and milk... As much as 90% (or more) of Scandinavians have the enzyme that breaks down lactose, many other western Europeans also have it to some degree and you can find it in parts of Africa and the Middle East. At some point those that could drink milk from their cattle survived much better when every other food source failed. Being attractive doesn't really help you much in such a situation.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 TheCustomLime wrote:
True, very true, but there are parts of beauty that are linked to good genes like symmetry of the face, clarity of the skin and body shape. I would think that those items would be superior on future humans because of years of selective breeding. But, you are right, for all we know the humans of 40k are beautiful to the generation that designed their genetic code.

Except humans aren't being selectively bred now, nor are they in the 41st millennium.

Attractive qualities change over time and vary by culture even. Also, someone being "unattractive" doesn't mean they don't reproduce. We aren't removing "ugly" from the genepool.

Beauty standards here on Earth vary widely. Take the hundreds of standards of beauty we have today and multiply that by 100 million. You'll quickly find that there will be no uniform standard.

You might find a few planets that used selective breeding and/or eugenics, but they'll be a rarity.

Ah, used the wrong terms. I meant that as our understanding of genetics increases we will eventually come to the point where we can make "perfect" babies, removing certain alleles from our gene pool or at least making them less common. My question is why humans in the 41st millennium, who had undergone centuries of such a level of understanding of genetics, do not look better or at least different than what we look like today.

I suppose conditions similar to primeval earth would produce favor traits that would reproduce what humans looked like before all of this happened. Which is why it's entirely appropriate for distinctly Caucasian people to exist so far into the future if they came from an environment similar to northern Eurasia.

Basically every description of Mankind's spread from Terra in M15 or so describes them creating colonies based on shared values or interests... which only makes sense. If you want to colonize a planet, you don't send a bunch of people who hated each other on Earth to live together in space.

Don't forget that at no fewer than three separate times in its history Mankind has nearly annihilated itself, and unleashed upon itself all kinds of terrible weaponry. While the wealthiest may have, at one time, been favored with the technology to build perfect babies, this probably did not get much further past the middle class (if even that), and then things like the War of Iron happened, which destroyed all of the technology that made such things possible, and also nearly killed off humanity. Oh, and they were purposefully designing and building people with a third eye in their forehead for a reason, so apparently nifty utility overtook good looks as a genetic concern.

So we had the Age of Strife, which lasted some 5 to 7 thousand years, the War of Iron where Mankind was nearly exterminated by their robot-slaves, and all of the advances from the Age of Technology were lost, with human worlds descending back to Stone Age levels.

And then the Great Crusade comes along, and then the Horus Heresy, and Mankind further feths itself. The idea of genetically building perfect babies is a science many, many thousands of years lost by the time M40 rolled around, and had not been a viable technology for the previous 10,000 years in M30.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
After responding to the Female Primarch thread I got to thinking about genetics versus looks. "Good looks", as we know them, are simply signs of good genes. In the near future our understanding of genetics will allow us to make "perfect" babies that express genes we find desirable. Humanity has been in a position to make perfect babies according to consumer tastes for quite awhile in the 40k universe. In addition to the Dark Age of Technology we also have our near future and the time beyond that. This would mean that the alleles that are considered "undesirable" would be weeded out from the gene pool over time. So, why aren't humans in 40k better looking than in our time?

Sure, I can understand that millennia of being "savage" would somewhat cloud the gene pool because of random mutations but 10,000 years isn't enough time to reproduce all of the alleles that made "ugly" people. At least not on a massive scale. Is it just because the people who write 40k don't really understand science all too well, is it environmental factors or is it an artistic choice for more Grimdark? Remember, I'm not talking about bomb shells I am just saying on average they should be at least good looking.

This sounds like social darwinist/eugenics movement type 'science' (notice the quotes? thats because it has no real basis in science). 'Good looks' have little to do with 'good genes'. They DO have to do with genes, that is to say, your physical features are a result of your genetic make up, but the two have no relation in regards to whether or not your genetics are 'good'. In fact, some of the features that are often considered attractive are the result of bad genes/genetic weaknesses, but thats another story.

 HenryH wrote:
Good looks are NOT "simply signs of good genes". The paradigm of beauty has evolved and changed, even within the last 50 years. We have no way of knowing what will be considered beautiful or desirable in 100 years, let alone 40'000.

It is also dependent on diet and health care. Neither of which are fantastic in 40k.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Besides, I think this is pretty hot;

Spoiler:

Of course, your mileage may vary.

I'd hit it.

 Void__Dragon wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Besides, I think this is pretty hot;

Spoiler:

Of course, your mileage may vary.

I'd hit it.

 Psienesis wrote:
Basically every description of Mankind's spread from Terra in M15 or so describes them creating colonies based on shared values or interests... which only makes sense. If you want to colonize a planet, you don't send a bunch of people who hated each other on Earth to live together in space.

Don't forget that at no fewer than three separate times in its history Mankind has nearly annihilated itself, and unleashed upon itself all kinds of terrible weaponry. While the wealthiest may have, at one time, been favored with the technology to build perfect babies, this probably did not get much further past the middle class (if even that), and then things like the War of Iron happened, which destroyed all of the technology that made such things possible, and also nearly killed off humanity. Oh, and they were purposefully designing and building people with a third eye in their forehead for a reason, so apparently nifty utility overtook good looks as a genetic concern.

So we had the Age of Strife, which lasted some 5 to 7 thousand years, the War of Iron where Mankind was nearly exterminated by their robot-slaves, and all of the advances from the Age of Technology were lost, with human worlds descending back to Stone Age levels.

And then the Great Crusade comes along, and then the Horus Heresy, and Mankind further feths itself. The idea of genetically building perfect babies is a science many, many thousands of years lost by the time M40 rolled around, and had not been a viable technology for the previous 10,000 years in M30.

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation Psienesis.

I think it would be kind of cool if humanity in the 41st millennium looked drastically different than today thanks to the previous generations genetic tampering but that's just me.

@chaos0xomega

It's not so much Eugenics as much as people being vain and wanting better looking kids. I admit my understanding of genetics is pedestrian at best, so, I am probably mistaken in my thought that good looks is a sign of good genes.

@Furyou Miko about the person you find attractive.

Uhhh, yeah, I think she has a nice body but I am terrified of what is under that helmet. If blanche is to be believed it's a skull with tubes coming out of it.

You're assuming that's a helmet? :p

Well, it sort of does, in a way. We have, what, four examples of ab-humans? Squats, Ratlings, Ogryn and those new cat-people (Felidae? Something like that?)? These are human beings who's genetic makeup has been so altered by environmental conditions that it has created new, true-breeding strains of the human genome.

Given that this is a fantasy game in space, there's nothing stopping you from coming up with new kinds of ab-humans in your personal setting of 40K. Hell, maybe there's a whole sub-sector of worlds that, for whatever reason, started out as some sort of eugenics experiments in M18, and now all you have are systems of Planet Swimsuit-and-Underwear Models, where every native is so disgustingly hot and photogenic that other aspects of the Imperium get jealous and want them exterminated, or are strangely aroused and want entire worlds cross-populated by them in order to bring up the Imperial average.

Hell, maybe the people of Planet Swimsuit-and-Underwear Models are so damn hot that even Eldar forget they are humans and try to get their Captain Kirk on.

 Maniac_nmt wrote:

 HenryH wrote:
Good looks are NOT "simply signs of good genes". The paradigm of beauty has evolved and changed, even within the last 50 years. We have no way of knowing what will be considered beautiful or desirable in 100 years, let alone 40'000.

It is also dependent on diet and health care. Neither of which are fantastic in 40k.

You base that on what exactly?

The Imperium is not made up only of Hive Worlds. They only make up a small portion of the Imperium's planets.

Most planets are defined as Civilized worlds, a population between 15 million and 10 billion, IE: basically like modern day Earth.

They also have planets who do nothing but grow food(Agri-worlds)


Sure, a Hive World might have a substandard level of nutrition, but it could also have a good level. The Imperium is not all grimdark and bleak. There are nice places, contrary to popular belief. Most planets haven't seen war for several millennium. The worst they might have is some organized crime and a normal level of poverty.

The Imperium is not a homogenous organization. While life may suck in a lot of places, it will be quite livable in others.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
You're assuming that's a helmet? :p

....Yeah, I guess I should know better at this point.


@Psienesis

I don't think Eldar would be into that sort of thing. Now, Dark Eldar on the other hand....

More on topic, we can assume that the average 40k citizen lives in a state similar to that of your average less developed country even on nicer worlds. However, is genetic science a lost art generally speaking? Or is it one of those things that you can only access with enough money?

Actually, given the stigma of mutation, its probably highly frowned upon to experiment or otherwise doodle with the sacred human form. But there might be any number of illegal avenues to get what you want.

They probably do have the tech level to do it though, but use the techniques instead for, expensive, Juvnat treatments.

 TheCustomLime wrote:

Ah, used the wrong terms. I meant that as our understanding of genetics increases we will eventually come to the point where we can make "perfect" babies, removing certain alleles from our gene pool or at least making them less common. My question is why humans in the 41st millennium, who had undergone centuries of such a level of understanding of genetics, do not look better or at least different than what we look like today.

1. There is the very good 'narrative' reason: The writers of the setting (and indeed most Sci-Fi settings) want us to relate to the humans of the future, even the far future, and to do this, they make them essentially 'us'. (there is a wonderful line in Dr Who about this, wish I could remember it).

2. The 'in-setting' justifications are easy, so easy, I am surprised anyone would expect things to be different. Just because we we develop the technology to make 'perfect' babies does not automatically lead to the removal of 'bad' genes from the gene-pool. To have that happen one of 2 (implausible) scenarios would have needed to occur:

- In the first one, the technology would need to become so basic, so cheep, so wide-spread, so 'essential' that nearly everybody, even the poorest people In. The. World. would have adopted it, AND then chosen to use it in the same way, to eliminate the same 'alleles'. Yeaaaaaaah, that's not likely, I can buy medicine over the counter that costs me less than a bowl of cereal that would save a life in a 3rd world country, and yet people still die for want of it.

- In the second one you would need a powerful authoritarian regime that controls all of man kind, with the wealth, infrastructure (or willingness to practice genocide as a shortcut), and desire to administer these treatments in the same way to all of humanity (rich & poor, powerful and powerless). That's just highly impractical, and further compounded by the possibility that such technology is developed AFTER space travel, and the regime have to have that level of control over interstellar colonies as well.

Essentially; people being 'prettier' in the future is not a given, or a logical progression of 'science'.

There is a eugenics program, now I think about it, to improve the breeding stock of Imperial nobles - governors and nobility and the like. It's run by the Orders Famulous of the Adepta Sororitas, who make sure that the important people they're assigned to make the right arranged marriages and fall in love with the right people otherwise.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
There is a eugenics program, now I think about it, to improve the breeding stock of Imperial nobles - governors and nobility and the like. It's run by the Orders Famulous of the Adepta Sororitas, who make sure that the important people they're assigned to make the right arranged marriages and fall in love with the right people otherwise.

But is this program designed to improve their genetics or just improve the political stability of the nobility?

It's got nothing to do with the political stability of the nobility, it's about retaining control and putting the people the church wants in charge there. It's about aggrandising pure humanity and weeding out negative traits.

.... which is funny, at least in DH, because having a Famulous-built bloodline comes with a few negative traits due to the relative straightness of your family tree. The Famulous apparently have people marrying a little too close to home.

Well, that's because Dark Heresy authors hate the Sisterhood.

Not really... built right, a Sisters character becomes god-awfully powerful. The various Faith powers out of Blood of Martyrs are disgustingly OP, and are basically Space Magic that even Untouchables can't stop.

But given that the Famulous are more interested in building pro-Ecclesiarchal dynasties and promoting stable noble lines in the rulership of worlds, you get up to cross-breeding between allied families that have been interbreeding for generations, so you start getting some issues of poor genetic variation. So you have kids who are albinos or of weak constitution or sweat blood or other actual things that inbred nobles have done in the real world.

 TheCustomLime wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
The reason everyone wouldn't be "hot" is because evolution doesn't work that way.

Traits which benefit reproduction or survival have the greatest chance to be selected for, for sure. Attractiveness would seem to be such a trait. But the truth is that attractiveness, to some degree, comes down to taste. What you consider attractive is controlled by cultural norms by and large. What is attractive varies from culture to culture, even on Earth, and in a place as diverse as the Imperium there is a lot of scope for differing cultural pressures. Culture also changes too rapidly for it to realistically be an agent of evolutionary change- there might be a selective pressure towards, for example, bigger buttocks, for a generation or two, but then it would likely fracture, and some new ideal of attractiveness would come forward. It is difficult to comprehend this because we are stuck in our own timeframe and the culture we have seems like it's been really constant for a long time, but in evolutionary terms it's an eyeblink.

Add to this, that the strongest selective pressures in any galaxy spanning empire are likely to be extremely local- varying radiation levels, gravitational pulls, dietary intakes and levels of predation from native life forms would all be much more stable and long lasting selective pressures for most colonists. Due to gene linkage, if the genes for less than pleasing symmetry and the genes with a mutation that, for example, helps the colonist to deal with a lower oxygen content in the air, or a higher solar radiation, or whatever, are located together, that means the likelyhood could be that "unattractive looks" could be selected for much more strongly than "attractive looks" just because of various founder effects and so on.

In short, genetics, natural selection and evolution are all much more complicated than they are generally thought to be!

Ah, that is actually a good point Da Boss. I never considered the fact that "ugliness" survived in the gene pool for a reason. I assumed it was some sort of genetic anomaly that survived for whatever reason.

See, I wasn't really buying the "standards of beauty change" argument because there are parts of beauty that isn't dominated so much by societal pressures. Babies go for certain features that are considered attractive, for example. What I was getting at in the original post is that these features would be prominent in future humans because things like asymmetrical faces would have been bred out by artificial genetic selection. I suppose what I mean is that future actions of "designer babies" would be, if I remembering the term correctly, a genetic bottleneck. Has there been any research as to why features we consider unattractive remain in the gene pool?

@Furyou Miko
I find Blanche's artwork to be waaay too busy and strange for the most part. The only exceptions are his Imperial Navy artwork. That stuff is brilliant.

@Psienesis
Where is the source for this? I am genuinely curious since my impression of 40k is that the "Planet of Hats" thing that dominates most 40k worlds came about due to the colonists adapting to the environment instead of the other way around.

These traits stay in the gene pool because being ugly doesn't stop you getting laid, particularly by other ugly people, and therefore it is not a negative selective pressure.