Why are most races humanoid?

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**Brennonjw**

fluff wise: the old ones made eldar, orks, and humans, didn't they? or was it just orks and humans?
tabletop wise: ease of moddling. OR We have orks, elves, humans, and daemons, fantasy tropes in a sci-fi setting, so that is probably the best explanation, looking back at it.

**urbanknight4**

Smacks wrote:
ConanMan wrote:
David berlinkski is the best sceptic on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeSaUq-Hl8
His comment about dogs is bordering on delusional. Dogs show an incredible amount of diversity and specialisation.

Spoiler:

The fact is, if these two animals were found next to each other in the fossil record, they would unquestionably be classed as different species by biologists. Interestingly, most dog breeds, including great Danes and yorkies, were bred within the last ~200 years, and they certainly have a common ancestor within a few thousand years. So we know that in a few thousand years, selection pressure can create an incredible amount of variety. We see it everywhere in domestic plants and animals, even in domestic pests, such as house mice.

If all that is possible within a few thousand years, then it seems fairly obtuse to claim that speciation occurring naturally is "unlikely", given over three billion years and trillions upon trillions of organisms to work on. At those odds, even ten million to one shots become practical certainties, so the word "unlikely" really takes on a whole new meaning.

ConanMan wrote:
- the Cambrian explosion
Something that "may or may not" have happened over 500 million years ago, being a bit of a mystery, is hardly surprising. It certainly doesn't disprove evolution.

ConanMan wrote:
I find no-one (not one) person who as a broader world view admitting the plausibility as even rational.
A person with "a broader world view"? Is that kind of like "a true Scotsman"?

ConanMan wrote:
are not "obligate non believers" in evolution the best mind to scrutinise it's worth?)
No, a critical and rational mind is the best mind to scrutinise scientific theories. Obligate non believers are, by definition, irrational crackpots. That would be like saying flat Earthers are the best minds to scrutinise general relativity. We know the Earth is round, we have seen the photos, we've got working GPS, I have personally been to the southern hemisphere and can confirm that all the stars and the moon appear upside-down. Flat earthers are just irrational idiots who won't listen to reason, and evolution denialists are exactly the same calibre of idiot.

Its cool that you guys like to debate about this and junk, but keep in mind that this isn't the place for that. PM him or start a new thread, don't derail this one.

**Talon of Anathrax**

urbanknight4 wrote:
Smacks wrote:
ConanMan wrote:
David berlinkski is the best sceptic on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeSaUq-Hl8
His comment about dogs is bordering on delusional. Dogs show an incredible amount of diversity and specialisation.

Spoiler:

The fact is, if these two animals were found next to each other in the fossil record, they would unquestionably be classed as different species by biologists. Interestingly, most dog breeds, including great Danes and yorkies, were bred within the last ~200 years, and they certainly have a common ancestor within a few thousand years. So we know that in a few thousand years, selection pressure can create an incredible amount of variety. We see it everywhere in domestic plants and animals, even in domestic pests, such as house mice.

If all that is possible within a few thousand years, then it seems fairly obtuse to claim that speciation occurring naturally is "unlikely", given over three billion years and trillions upon trillions of organisms to work on. At those odds, even ten million to one shots become practical certainties, so the word "unlikely" really takes on a whole new meaning.

ConanMan wrote:
- the Cambrian explosion
Something that "may or may not" have happened over 500 million years ago, being a bit of a mystery, is hardly surprising. It certainly doesn't disprove evolution.

ConanMan wrote:
I find no-one (not one) person who as a broader world view admitting the plausibility as even rational.
A person with "a broader world view"? Is that kind of like "a true Scotsman"?

ConanMan wrote:
are not "obligate non believers" in evolution the best mind to scrutinise it's worth?)
No, a critical and rational mind is the best mind to scrutinise scientific theories. Obligate non believers are, by definition, irrational crackpots. That would be like saying flat Earthers are the best minds to scrutinise general relativity. We know the Earth is round, we have seen the photos, we've got working GPS, I have personally been to the southern hemisphere and can confirm that all the stars and the moon appear upside-down. Flat earthers are just irrational idiots who won't listen to reason, and evolution denialists are exactly the same calibre of idiot.

Its cool that you guys like to debate about this and junk, but keep in mind that this isn't the place for that. PM him or start a new thread, don't derail this one.

But it was so interesting...
[Sobs]

**Psienesis**

Brennonjw wrote:
fluff wise: the old ones made eldar, orks, and humans, didn't they? or was it just orks and humans?
tabletop wise: ease of moddling. OR We have orks, elves, humans, and daemons, fantasy tropes in a sci-fi setting, so that is probably the best explanation, looking back at it.

Old Ones sorta-kinda made Eldar and Orks. They might have had a hand in guiding Terra's development to create humans, but were extinct many, many, many millions of years before Humanity existed.

**Furyou Miko**

The only direct statement we've got about humans is that at some point, Necrons introduced the Pariah gene.

Hm. The War in Heaven ended 25 million years ago (by our perspective, rounded to the nearest million). Modern humanity has been around for what, two hundred thousand years? Point eight percent of the time...

**SagesStone**

chromedog wrote:
Eldar were DESIGNED by the old ones - the psychic race for their war against the other things.
Orks were DESIGNED by the old ones as the muscle for that same war.

Humanity is an "accident" of mutation and evolution. They were not designed this way, they just happened.

Tau are more or less also the result of evolutionary pressures - but it may or may not have been "nudged" along.

However the ancestors for humanity were an ongoing experiment by the old ones iirc, just never came to complete them for whatever reason. Then their crap got in the way.

**Psienesis**

Even the ancestors for humanity aren't that old. At most, we top out at like 5 million years. The War in Heaven ended some 60 million years ago. The only thing on Earth 60 million years ago were tiny mammals, some birds, and whatever dinosaurs had managed to survive the mass extinction event of their kind. Some fish, too.

**dusara217**

n0t_u wrote:
chromedog wrote:
Eldar were DESIGNED by the old ones - the psychic race for their war against the other things.
Orks were DESIGNED by the old ones as the muscle for that same war.

Humanity is an "accident" of mutation and evolution. They were not designed this way, they just happened.

Tau are more or less also the result of evolutionary pressures - but it may or may not have been "nudged" along.

However the ancestors for humanity were an ongoing experiment by the old ones iirc, just never came to complete them for whatever reason. Then their crap got in the way.

Source, please? This is something i'd love to read about

**Furyou Miko**

Edit: making an idiot out of myself, please ignore.

**Smacks**

EDIT: I like cake

**Furyou Miko**

Edit: maths has an 's' on the end.

**urbanknight4**

Edit: I vote we all get paid by the admins here for our exemplary editing work.

**Selym**

Edit: I'll take £10 an hour

**urbanknight4**

Selym wrote:
Edit: I'll take £10 a minute

Fixed that for you

**DeLong**

It is just harder to relate with. non humanoids are also almost always evil such as tryanids.

**Haruspex**

Even the Tyranids are inexplicably humanoid. The non-fluff reason for this is that they're based on H.R. Giger's alien which in the original movie was a lone hybrid monster that had used a human as an incubator and borrowed his DNA. From an in-fluff perspective I would say that it's solid evidence that the Tyranids are just plain stupid. You can create whatever living organic weapon you need, why make a giant bug/ape that somebody can shoot or set on fire? You could just make quintillions of deadly microorganisms and turn your enemies inside-out.

**DeLong**

Maybe they have its just killing you slowly. It's a bad prototype ha.

**LumenPraebeo**

Haruspex wrote:
Even the Tyranids are inexplicably humanoid. The non-fluff reason for this is that they're based on H.R. Giger's alien which in the original movie was a lone hybrid monster that had used a human as an incubator and borrowed his DNA. From an in-fluff perspective I would say that it's solid evidence that the Tyranids are just plain stupid. You can create whatever living organic weapon you need, why make a giant bug/ape that somebody can shoot or set on fire? You could just make quintillions of deadly microorganisms and turn your enemies inside-out.

There are advantages to both being a microbe and being a multicellular organism. Its why organisms have evolved the way they did. You cant carry as much a load when you're microscpic, or travel as far. You'd have to rely on means of transportation that you yourself can't entirely control. Plus tyranids are birthed and grown on a need-to basis. It might be harder to produce exact numbers the smaller the life form gets without expending excess biomass.

**Spineyguy**

I think, realistically, the prevalence of humanoid designs for Xenomorphs in fiction has three major contributing factors:

1. Humans (at least, we in the post-Christian West) are really bloody arrogant, and like to think of ourselves as the basic template of superiority. We therefore write ourselves into most fictions as the implicit 'dominant race', even when our natural shortcomings would stop this. We like to assume that the Galaxy/Universe is basically just a bigger version of Earth, and that if our little world were scaled-up to that sort of degree, we'd still be on top.

2. Creating alien races is flipping hard. It's a process that involves essentially trying to second-guess how evolution would work when combined with advanced astronomy. An author's creativity may only extend as far as his knowledge permits.

3. We know from the study of film that special effects are expensive, and for most of the lives of the authors that forge a lot of our sci-fi continuities, aliens were just men in rubber suits. Obviously now we have animatronics and CGI to give us some more diverse designs, but the people who do the creative bit are still from that generation, and are naturally going to take their inspiration from the things which made them who they are.

That said, if we're talking about an in-universe reason, then I'd simply say 'convergent evolution' and be done with it. We know from experience that the only world we can be sure currently supports complex life is very Earth-like (really, the similarity is uncanny). We can be fairly sure that this template, while almost certainly not the only one that works, is one that works. It stands to reason that on worlds similar to ours, species would evolve that are similar to those that we have already encountered.

**ChazSexington**

Humans rose to the top not because we were faster, stronger, bigger - A lion or a tiger takes us out on all those points.

We think good. We can make tools to pick our noses and rockets to go to the moon (though we're still struggling with a good solution for toy soldier paint storage), never mind tools to kill off most other species, be it nuclear weapons or antibiotics. Opposable thumbs help too.

However, we've only been around for 200,000 years. That's nothing. Cyanobacteria have been around for 2,100,000,000 years. Whether our strategy is one for the long run is debatable, which is why several scientists have advocated colonising other planets to not have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak.

And we all know tunas rule the food chain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4wykeJBHdE