Thought on the Phamysht - for Brad and co

from StarControl Forums

Shade and I were spitballing about the Phamysht on Discord, and I just wanted to post the thought here so it would get seen, as I thought it was a potential interesting idea if @frogboy and co are remotely interested in maybe extending it and exploring it in the adventure game. In the vein of the whole "aliens may not be very relatable to our own ideals" etc.

We were talking about the Phamysht exchanging members of their own species to be food, and I proposed the idea that their species might be caste based (like ants etc) and that there could be a special caste who are purely bred to be eaten.

Here's the cool bit (IMO) - if you were the kind of species who would eat members of your own species, the tastier ones would probably tend to devolve over time (since their senses don't do anything and thus are no biological benefit) and in fact would probably be selected away (given the choice, people might prefer to eat something without eyes or the ability to cry as you tuck in, so those would get bred more etc, and they would actually be evolved away from sentience through artificial selection). So you end up with a caste that is essentially just a meatsack. It's technically still part of your species, but has been selectively bred out of sentience (and into being super tasty)

But even more horrifying is the idea that they may have only been selectively bred away from having the *ability* to complain while you're eating them or look at you and shed a tear, but they may actually still have fully functioning brains in there which suffer through the entire eating/digestion process but have no ability to express their terror and anguish. Definite shades of "For I have no mouth and I must scream". Either the Phamysht don't actually know this, or they do and don't care, which is whole other levels of messed up.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring it up so it didn't just vanish into the discord ether, as I thought it was something that could be cool to explore as a concept in-game in some fashion.

59,621 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from StarControl Forums Top

Cool.  I read a scifi story that gives me an idea for how the Phamysht could claim that what eating their own species is morally justified.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

 

This is a bit of a spoiler, but one of the alien species has lots of offspring because it evolved from an r-strategy reproduction species.  See the below link for an explanation.

https://www.cs.montana.edu/webworks/projects/stevesbook/contents/chapters/chapter002/section004/blue/page003.html

 

So once their society invented farming they ended up eating the surplus babies.  See this quote:

The Xenopsychologist was two hundred and fifty years old.  She looked much older, now, as as she spoke.  "In terms of evolutionary psychology... I think I understand what happened.  The ancestors of the Babyeaters were a species that gave birth to hundreds of offspring in a spawning season, like Terrestrial fish; what we call r-strategy reproduction.  But the ancestral Babyeaters discovered... crystal-tending, a kind of agriculture... long before humans did.  They were around as smart as chimpanzees, when they started farming.  The adults federated into tribes so they could guard territories and tend crystal.  They adapted to pen up their offspring, to keep them around in herds so they could feed them.  But they couldn't produce enough crystal for all the children.

"It's a truism in evolutionary biology that group selection can't work among non-relatives.  The exception is if there are enforcement mechanisms, punishment for defectors - then there's no individual advantage to cheating, because you get slapped down.  That's what happened with the Babyeaters.  They didn't restrain theirindividualreproduction because the more children they put in the tribal pen, the more children of theirs were likely to survive.  But the total production of offspring from the tribal pen was greater, if the children were winnowed down, and the survivors got more individual resources and attention afterward.  That was how their species began to shift toward a k-strategy, an individual survival strategy.  That was the beginning of their culture.

"And anyone who tried to cheat, to hide away a child, or even go easier on their own children during the winnowing - well, the Babyeaters treated the merciful parents the same way that human tribes treat their traitors.

"They developed psychological adaptations for enforcing that, their first great group norm.  And those psychological adaptations, those emotions, were reused over the course of their evolution, as the Babyeaters began to adapt to their more complex societies.  Honor, friendship, the good of our tribe - the Babyeaters acquired many of the same moral adaptations as humans, but their brains reused the emotional circuitry of infanticide to do it.

Reply #2 from StarControl Forums Top

Read the Mote in Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle....every city has a herd of meats...and the populations are rising.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Stardock.net Forums Top


We were talking about the Phamysht exchanging members of their own species to be food, and I proposed the idea that their species might be caste based (like ants etc) and that there could be a special caste who are purely bred to be eaten.

This is pretty much how the Phamyst are and one of the issues the player runs into with them.  They don't understand why you don't just send someone over as part of the ritual.  Are you just rude?

Reply #4 from Stardock.net Forums Top

(reading further)  Yea, you definitely have a pretty good lock on the phamyst.

 

Reply #5 from StarControl Forums Top

Been wanting to show the Phamyst but believe it or not, we're having a challenge getting their needle teeth looking the way we want. :)

Reply #6 from StarControl Forums Top

Looking forward to seeing them once you sort it out :-)