Why do adult Gorn even exist when the young can apparently reproduce immediately?
Why do adult Gorn even exist when the young can apparently reproduce immediately?
In SNW 1x09 All Those Who Wander, the crew reenact Aliens with a handful of baby Gorn as their adversaries. We learn that Gorn breed by infecting a host animal with eggs, which hatch and burst out of the host when mature (which can take months or hours, apparently depending on the host). The babies are immediately hostile to other baby Gorn, and are left to their own devices until they are picked up by adults at some indeterminate point. We also learn that these baby Gorn are themselves capable of implanting eggs in a host by spitting on them.
These baby Gorn seem like a full fledged viable species already: small, vicious hunters who are (like tribbles) basically born pregnant. From an evolutionary perspective, that's plenty to propagate their own existence. It's also a lifestyle that selects for intelligence (small hunters tend to be pretty smart) but seems like an unlikely route to developing genuine sapience. We'd expect these baby Gorn to have a relatively stable population given the turnaround times of egg maturation and their predilection towards cannibalism, and the later feature would also make it far less likely that any given individual would survive long enough to become an adult, as each fresh generation brings a wave of fresh adversaries who vastly outnumber the handful of survivors from previous waves.
Of course, we know there are adult Gorn. So, how did they come to be? Why would there be a species where the adults are intelligent and social enough to be a spacefaring power, and yet apparently nothing they learn as an adult is needed for an individual to pass on it's genes?
So we know Gorn capture other species, pit them against the Gorn and each other ala the strongest M&M copypasta, and then send the strongest M&M back to
M&M Marsspace. La'an was the strongest M&M, for example.Maybe, originally on the Gorn home planet, the strongest just keep growing to fend off an ever increasing wave of hostile baby Gorn, becoming more cunning and intelligent on each subsequent generation. Maybe the spacefaring stuff was originally some Gorn thinking "wow this planet sucks, I need to get away from it so I'm not eaten by my own young."
And now, perhaps the Gorn do the same for their terrible cannibal babies - they get pitted against each other in the Baby Gorn Fighting Arena, Sponsored by M&M Mars, and the strongest are kept to become adult Gorn and to be used for breeding purposes and also for spacefaring stuff.
Maybe the Gorn are just trying to help other species become stronger. They are helping to select for the strongest M&M to send back to the factory for breeding purposes, and we just don't understand - cultural differences and all that.
So we know Gorn capture other species, pit them against the Gorn and each other ala the strongest M&M copypasta, and then send the strongest M&M back to M&M Mars space. La’an was the strongest M&M, for example.
I tried to touch on this in my OP, but the problem with this is that unless Gorn generations are very spread out (unlikely, given the rapid gestation period and rather ad-hoc method of implanting eggs), the odds of a "superior" elder beating out all of it's slightly younger competition remains quite slim. This is a brawl, not a neatly organized bracket, and random chance will invariably play a big role in who wins and who loses. The top Gorn from generation A suddenly finds itself as merely a slightly advantaged individual in a whole new field of competitors the overwhelming likelihood is that one of them will prove the ultimate winner, and then suffer the same fate. If the "strongest M&M" were thrown into a fresh bracket instead of being mailed to the parent company, it's almost certain to be toppled. You wind up with a species whose "true" lifespan and adult form is irrelevant, because every individual dies long before they come anywhere near adulthood.
More importantly from an evolutionary perspective, though, the success or lack thereof of an individual Gorn has almost no effect on their ability to reproduce. All the Gorn need, apparently, is to survive long enough to spit on a viable host. Anything that happens after they do that is irrelevant, and thus won't be selected for evolutionarily. And it strikes me as highly improbable that growing to much greater size and having enormous strength (never mind developing sapience) are unlikely to emerge by pure chance without evolutionary pressures making those traits more likely to be passed on.
The "Strongest M&M" problem is probably mitigated by lower density of baby Gorn in the wild than what we've seen on screen so far. If a brood typically manages to winnow itself down to a single individual before any of them can spit on a host, and the hist typically has enough time to travel somewhere else before the next generation hatches, then you have a situation where the strongest of the babies will generally reproduce and then generally have the chance to continue growing into "true" adulthood. Unfortunately that still doesn't answer my second question of how that adult form evolved at all when it's very existence has no clear benefit to the animal's ability to reproduce.
This uncontrolled breed-mayhem on that planet may be, because it was this situation out of the norm. From what La'an said, i had the impression that they systematically used the humans for breeding and food.
The Young ones could be left to their own devices in a controlled manner. Much like birds, the younglings of some species also attack each other. The strongest survives.
I like to think that, at home, the adult Gorn pretty much have their kids under control.
But, yeah, they reproduce out of the box.
It's because, aliens ...
Well you're reasoning based on ancient Darwinian doctrine from the 21st century... That's completely surpassed at the time of SNW!
I mean, not much time later the crew of another enterprise discovers that it's somehow possible to seed the galaxy with... Something that directs evolution towards humanoid races, so....
It’s also a lifestyle that selects for intelligence (small hunters tend to be pretty smart)
Humans are already on the large side for mammals and are pretty intelligent (or let’s rather say successful)
Why would there be a species where the adults are intelligent and social enough to be a spacefaring power, and yet apparently nothing they learn as an adult is needed for an individual to pass on it’s genes?
You already do know another species who does that, and you call those useless adults Nana and Gramps.
There’s more to a society (and to evolution) than just surviving and procreating, you need knowledge and history. This you can only build when you’re not constantly fighting for the very survival, so having people around who aren’t busy with procreating all the time is actually the most likely route to developing genuine sapience.
The grandparents effect did occur to me, but I'm not sure what exactly these few Gorn who reach adulthood are doing to make their descendants (who they implanted in a host long before they themselves grew to maturity) more likely to survive. Even assuming these adults are in position to assist their offspring, the kids are quite capable hunters and don't seem to need protection against anything except eachother.
Look, I just gave you real world examples why and how your view on evolution is undercomplex and wrong, also I did explicitly tell you there’s more to society than the pure basics of evolution.
Maybe – just a really wild speculation here – the adult Gorns are responsible for the Gorns being a space-faring species, like, you know, the same way humans don’t need school and university for survival…
Evolution doesn't run on "need."
Some baby Gorn will stumble to maturity, and those individuals should be better at killing, while being no less capable of reproducing. No flood of fresh-out-the-eggsac lizard mantises is about to outsmart the killiest Gorn of her generation.
Selection pressure is thus toward Gorn who can survive their own adolescence, or at least survive long enough to reproduce. Adult Gorn are a goal, if not the goal, even if getting there takes a few recursions. The genes want to be inside a cannibal with a spaceship.
Let's imagine the baby Gorn start off the way you describe, a perpetual small hunter that also produces more offspring. As they age they get bigger and stronger before they finally die.
The adults who take care of their offspring have an advantage over adults who do not care for their offspring, and possibly even more over the babies who never become adults.
There is another selection barrier as well. If all you have are baby gorn, what happens when you run out of hosts? This can easily happen if the hosts are over-hunted. If baby gorn pop out and there are no hosts, and they die out in a few years or even months, that's an evolutionary dead end. The ones which can last a long time until new hosts are available will eventually be selected for.
They need someone to put the babies where they need to be at the very least
Do they? In the wild, the babies burst out of a host and are immediately capable of running around and spitting on things, which become infected and eventually babies burst out, onwards and onwards.
The Gorn practice of having separate breeding spaces is clearly an artificial construct designed (presumably by the Gorn themselves) to make it possible to have a functional civilization of adult beings. In the wild, anywhere that has viable hosts is a viable breeding area, and these creatures could not possibly have evolved this life cycle without viable hosts commonly available to them.
The nature of the Gorn seems to dictate that they run out of viable hosts quickly. I imagine the adults have always tried to disperse their children, even back on their home world. Eventually, they probably hit a wall, had a major population bust, and were forced to start exploring space for new breeding grounds so they didn't die out