Relic

case, as you said, the Missing Link.”

 

Intermediate form morphological characteristics:

Gracile

Brain capacity: 750cc

Bipedal, erect posture

Opposable thumb

Loss of opposability in toes

Below average sexual dimorphism

Weight, male, full grown: 55 kg

[263] Weight, female, full grown: 45 kg

Gestation period: eight months

Aggressiveness: low to moderate

Estrus cycle in female: suppressed

 

The list went on and on, growing more and more obscure. Under “osteology,” Margo could make out almost nothing.

 

Atavistic parietal foramina process

Greatly reduced iliac crest

10-12 thoracic vertebrae

Partially rotated greater trochanter

Prominent rim of orbit

Atavistic frontal process with prominent zygomatic process

 

That must mean beetle browed, thought Margo to herself.

 

Diurnal

Partially or serially monogamous

Lives in cooperative social groups

 

“Come on. How can your program tell something like this?” Margo asked, pointing to monogamous.

“Hormones,” said Kawakita. “There’s a gene that codes for a hormone seen in monogamous mammal species, but not in promiscuous species. In humans, this hormone has something to do with pair bonding. It isn’t present in chimps, who are notoriously promiscuous animals. And the fact that the female’s estrus cycle is suppressed—you also see that only in relatively monogamous species. The program uses a whole arsenal of tools—subtle AI algorithms, fuzzy logic—to interpret [264] the effect of whole suites of genes on the behavior and look of a proposed organism.”

“AI algorithms? Fuzzy logic? You’re losing me,” Margo said.

“Well, it really doesn’t matter. You don’t need to know all the secrets, anyway. What it boils down to is making the program think more like a person than a normal computer would. It makes educated guesses, uses intuition. That one trait, ‘cooperative,’ for example, is extrapolated from the presence or absence of some eighty different genes.”

“That’s all?” Margo said jokingly.

“No,” Kawakita replied. “You can also use the program to guess at a single organism’s size, shape, and behavior by entering the DNA for one creature instead of two, and disabling the extrapolation logic. And assuming the funding holds up, I plan to add two other modules for this program. The first will extrapolate back in time from a single species, and the second will extrapolate forward. In other words, we’ll be able to learn more about extinct creatures of the past, and guess at beings of the future.” He grinned. “Not bad, huh?”

“It’s amazing,” said Margo. She feared her own research project seemed puny by comparison. “How did you develop it?”

Kawakita hesitated, staring at her a little suspiciously. “When I first started working with Frock, he told me he was frustrated by the spottiness of the fossil record. He said he wanted to fill in the gaps, learn what the intermediate forms were. So I wrote this program. He gave me most of the rule tables. We started testing it with various species. Chimps and humans, as well as various bacteria for which we had a lot of genetic data. Then an incredible thing happened. Frock, the old devil, was expecting it, but I wasn’t. We compared the domesticated dog with the hyena, and what we got was not a smoothly intermediate species, but a bizarre life form, totally different from either dog or hyena. This happened with a [265] couple of other species pairs, too. You know what Frock said to that?”