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The projector screen above the lectern displayed ‘Mobian Genetics, an Introduction in large yellow letters on a blue background. The theatre was mostly full at this point, with a few stragglers creeping into the remaining gaps. There was a complete gamut of society present, even a few humans of different shades in a small cluster. The noise died off as the lecturer entered, he was an elderly rabbit with a piebald coat, wearing a tweed suit that had seen better days. As he reached the lectern he temporarily placed a pair of reading glasses on his nose to check something, then whipped them off to smile at the audience.
“Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to today’s lecture on An Introduction to Mobian Genetics. My name is Professor Lambsbread and I have been Chair of Cell and Developmental Biology at this institution for twenty years. Now I now that there are some who are uncomfortable with the term ‘Mobian’ but, for the purposes of brevity and clarity it will remain in place until we have something more appropriate. Now I know that this is a compulsory course and is somewhat redundant for those of you on a Biochemistry or similar path, but please try not to ruin the fun for everyone else.” He gave a self-deprecating little chuckle. “Now, let’s have a little icebreaker, I want every other column to stand up and take a good look around the room. Let’s do odd numbers first, if your seat ends in an odd number, please stand up and look at all the other people in the room.”
The people in odd numbered seats, with a few false starts and a bit of grumbling, got up and surveyed the room.
“Ok please sit down. And now the evens.” And after a minute or two: “Alright, now everyone please sit down.”
The rabbit bounced over to a large whiteboard and whipped out a black marker. He drew three lines on the board, giving four boxes.
“Now, I want anyone who has studied this subject to any sort of level before to raise your hands.” He bobbed his head as he checked. “Good, I didn’t want to spoil anyone’s fun.” He aimed the marker like a pointer at the crowd. “Er, you there, the Coati with the fluffy pen in the fourth row, stand up for us please miss.”
The coati stood up, blushing furiously at her pen.
“Now could you tell us all your name please, just the first name.”
“Er, it’s er, Zelia Sir.”
“Thank you Zelia,” he turned back to the whiteboard and put her name above one of the boxes. “I have a question for you.” He tapped into the empty box. “I want you to tell me how many species you think you saw when you looked around the room. The room seats three hundred and we’re almost full.”
“Er, um, something like, um, a hundred and seventy?”
He wrote 170 on the board. “Ok, that’s our first number. Now you there, the dark human lady on the aisle.”
A human woman with skin the colour of new polished rosewood stood up as Zelia the Coati sat down. “My name is Bintou,” she said in a thick accent. “B, I, N, T, O, U.”
“Thank you my dear, and how many species would you have made it?”
“To my count it is seventy-four.”
“That’s a confident number.”
He continued on to ask an over eager hawk named Terrence, sat in the front row, who guessed two hundred, and a distracted chameleon named Will, who made a stab at ninety.
“Well those are some numbers. I checked the list beforehand and ran up against the school records. If we use the species definition that’s in the local government book, and then indirectly is used in University records, there are seventy two species present here. That’s a very good eye Bintou.” This earned him a dazzling smile. “But what I’m going to tell you is that those numbers have absolutely no scientific bearing whatsoever.” He moved back to the lectern and picked up a clicker. The projection screen changed to one saying ‘Species, a definition’. “What we have to remember is that species is a mental construct, it isn’t a perfect definition we can always apply, but the simplest definition that makes sense to nearly everyone is..” He clicked again and the projector added: ‘the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.’
“Now using that definition we come up with a grand total of… one! There is only one species in this room and you all belong to it!”
This elicited a considerable murmur from the audience, the Professor waving a hand to shush them.
“Now that I’ve blown all of your minds I’m going to go into the meat of the matter.”
A click revealed a list of trigger warnings.
“Just so you know I will be talking about some diseases. There may also be use of words that may be considered by some to be racial slurs or unfortunate epithets due to the euphemism treadmill. If any of that makes you uncomfortable you have the option to leave now. Contact me afterwards and I will send you course materials and the required make up work.”
A few people left the room as he waited.
He clicked again to bring up a double karyogram. Forty-six vaguely X shaped squiggles arranged in pairs, labelled 1 to 22, with the final pair labelled X.
“Can anyone tell me what this lovely photograph is of?”
A few hands were raised. He pointed to a bull with a face full of piercings a few rows from the front.
“Er, they’re chromosomes?”
“Good start, where do you think we got them from?”
“Er, it’s got two X chromosomes so it must be a woman.”
“Excellent, smart lad there.” He used the laser pointer in his clicker to paint the two X chromosomes temporarily. “Can you tell me anything else?”
“Um… no?”
“Anyone else?” A few hands were hesitantly raised. “Ah, Bintou, I think this must be up your street.”
“There are Forty-Six chromosomes, so it must be a sample from a human female.”
“Excellent, also notice that the autosomes, that is the chromosomes not associated to sex selection, are numbered in descending order of size. The female gonosome, that is the sex determining chromosome, would be positioned somewhere around number 8 or 9 depending on its size.”
He clicked again and a new double karyogram was displayed, this time there being forty-eight pairs, labelled 0 to 22, with again the final pair labelled X. Hands were already being phrased as he started his question:
“And this is… Er you, in the spiffing trilby.”
“Mobian female, because it has forty-eight chromosomes.”
“That could be a bit of a leap, why isn’t it a primal great ape? They have forty-eight chromosomes too.”
The otter adjusted his hat self-consciously. “The labelling includes the zeroth chromosome; I think that’s convention only for Mobians.”
“I am undone by good labelling! Yes, you are exactly right. Now if I had shown you this forty years ago we would not have had the zeroth chromosome convention, in fact the first textbook I authored did not have it in. I want you to ponder a moment why that would be.”
He let the point simmer for a moment.
“Now I have a bit of a confession, Bintou, I’m sorry, but I tricked you. The first karyogram I showed was simply an edit of the second. It was just missing the zeroth chromosome.” He flicked between the two slides to make it obvious to the audience. “The mobian zeroth chromosome is strictly speaking an autosome, but due to its importance it is also called the zoonosome. I know there must be a few linguists in here who can hazard a guess to what that means.”
An unidentified person in the back called out “Animal body!”
“Yes, excellent. Now the zoonosome has two unusual features. Firstly, it is unusually large. Chromosome one, which is the second largest in mobians and the largest in humans is approximately two hundred and forty-eight thousand base pairs. The zeroth chromosome, so placed because it is so large, is an average of four hundred and seven thousand base pairs, nearly twice the size. Secondly, both copies within an individual are identical. The only homozygous chromosomes in an adult organism.”
The Professor returned to his lectern to take a short drink of water from a bottle.
“Now, the zoonosome is so named because it contains every gene that gives a person, sorry a mobian, their outward characteristics. It phenotypically overrides many of the other genes.” He clicked the slides forward again. “This is part of the reason why it is homozygous, if there were two chromosomes with the same effect there would be potential disaster, biologically speaking.” He shone his laser pointer at the projection, which was now displaying several cartoon images of cells with chromosomes. “Following fertilisation the chromosomes pair up, ready for the first cell division. However a very complex cascade is triggered, which causes an approximately random one of the two zoonosomes to be ejected in a polar body. I won’t go into it now, as it in itself is a whole series of lectures, but I did prepare a Review paper that I am very proud of, and the University are permitted to provide free copies on request. The details are in the course supplementals.” He leaned on his lectern and deliberately eyeballed the audience. “Now, does anyone know what can happen when that ejection process goes wrong?”
Someone left at the back of the hall, obviously upset as the door banged behind them.
“It is why I put the warnings; nature is not a kind mistress sometimes.”
The audience muttered amongst themselves for a bit, then a few hands were raised.
“Er you there, the er, puma?”
“Cougar, I think it’s called wuzzleism.”
“Yes, you’re exactly right. Named for Doctor Heinrich Wuzzle,” he said, pronouncing the first letter as a V. “Who characterised the condition in great detail and whose work provides most of the genetic counselling framework to this day. In unenlightened days those afflicted, even if it caused them no issues, would be disparaged as Wuzzles. Which is a very unfortunate term. The specific mixture of forms is not heritable, those afflicted who have children of their own that take after them normally have a child of the form of one of the grandparents. The likelihood of wuzzleism striking is, unfortunately heritable. There are often side effects of spontaneous abortion, difficulties for the mother in childbirth due to epigenetic complexities, and developmental disorders of the body and brain. For those with a propensity to the condition, the recommendation is to limit pairing within one’s kindred. Or possibly to follow an alternative that I will talk on later. Now another variant of the condition is that following the first ejection failure, the zygote divides completely in an unusual mixture of meiosis and mitosis. We end up with two separate zygotes, each having identical autosomes and gonosomes, but having different zoonosomes. A bit of a spin on identical twins, but from different kindreds.”
He clicked the projector again to a picture of two teenage boys, standing against a white wall and looking directly into the camera. Despite one being a fox, and the other a gecko, they were eerily similar in appearance.
“You can of course get identical twins who share the same zoonosome, and this is far more common. Fraternal twins can of course be of either kindred stock.”
He took another drink of water.
“Now, much less common, and usually far more devastating in developmental terms, is what happens if both zoonosomes are ejected and the zygote develops to term. Does anyone know the term for this condition?”
He waited over some muttering but no answers were forthcoming.
“Yes, it is thankfully rare. The condition is koboldism, its name taken from an ancient mythological creature.”
He clicked the slide again. It was a black and white photograph of what appeared to be a very small wizened human boy, sat on a chair between a male and a female fox who were standing, wearing old fashioned dress.
“This boy, shown here with his parents, was ten years old when this was taken. Effectively the child is genotypically and phenotypically very similar to a human suffering from a cluster of genetic conditions. The studies of rapid onset aging in humans, known as progeria, and koboldism often overlap. The reason I like to use this picture as it was taken in an area prior to any human contact, there are always doubters if I show something more modern.”
He waited a few moments to let the discomfort in the room dissipate. He clicked the slide again, and the ‘Species: the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.’ Slide appeared again.
“Now normally species with differing chromosome numbers cannot reproduce to produce fertile offspring. The classic example being the primal mule, that has an odd number of chromosomes and is therefore infertile. However, the zeroth chromosome’s unusual behaviour side steps this limitation.” He clicked the slide across to another cartoon of cells and chromosomes. “If we look at the fusion of a human gamete with a mobian gamete, we end up with a zygote with forty-seven chromosomes. There are forty-four autosomes, two gonosomes and one zoonosome. When a zoonosome finds itself on its own, it simply replicates and we end up with forty-eight chromosomes again. Without a lot of detailed analysis, the zygote formed looks, for all intents and purposes, to be mobian. There is quite a lot of evidence that this mechanism is an adaptation to prevent kobolodism.”
He clicked to another slide. There were photographs of three individuals, a male rabbit, a female fox, and a female squirrel, all arranged against a height chart in swim suits. They were all unusually tall and well built, the squirrel especially was positively Amazonian.
“There is considerable heterosis, that is to say hybrid vigour, in F1 hybrids. I should add that the term Effy is considered insulting and should not be used in polite company. When hybrids reach adulthood they are frequently more than three standard deviations above the mean for IQ, are taller, and have greater muscle tone and fatigue resistance. Unfortunately it isn’t all good news; females are significantly more likely to score highly for dark triad personality traits, and males suffer from depression and near double the base rate, in both cases even after correcting for IQ and background. Subsequent descendants will tend to regress towards the mean unless a conscious effort is made to keep alternating the mate pairings.”
He clicked the slide to a blank one.
“There’s no risk of wuzzleism in a human-mobian pairing. There is an increased risk of koboldism, but the severity is greatly reduced. Now back to that species term again, we have established that the pairings can give rise to fertile hybrids, therefore they fit the definition of species. However because of the fairly gross, that is gross as in large, morphological differences, it is considered appropriate to separate humans and mobians into two subspecies.”
He clicked again. The slide displayed Homo sapiens with two lines pointing out, one to an icon of a human, the other to an icon of a mobian.
“The names I’m about to give are the current convention, although considered controversial in some circles. What is the important takehome from this lecture is how closely related humans and mobians are. The current full length subspecies name for humans is;” he clicked the pointer. “Homo sapiens primigenus.” As it appeared on the board. “The current full length subspecies name for mobians is;” another click. “Homo sapiens dianae, which comes from the name of an ancient goddess of the wild.”
A hand was raised.
“Go ahead.”
“I know Homo sapiens, but what does the primigenus bit mean.”
“Crudely speaking it means original. Whether you take that as first or unflavoured is a matter of taste.” This earned a few titters from the audience. The professor dramatically checked his watch. “And unfortunately, we are all out of time. Please confirm your participation before leaving, otherwise you will have to do the makeup course and quiz. Please do read the supplemental literature on the course and do contact me if you have any questions.”
The class filed out. The professor caught a snatch of conversation where a portly gopher propositioned Bintou: “Hey girl, want to make some evil genius babies?” The flat “No.” she gave him was enough to make the professor crack a grin and stifle a laugh.
He sorted the last of his paperwork and turned off the projector as the last person left. There was a tentative knock at the door.
“Come in, we’re just finished.”
An arctic fox girl, red eyed from a bout of crying came in. “I just wanted to apologise for leaving like that, I didn’t mean to disturb but I thought I’d be ok with it.”
He offered her a clean tissue from a packet in his pocket.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, it happens nearly every time I give one of these. Is it a family member, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“My brother died a few weeks ago, he..” She stopped and blew her nose. “He was a few years younger than me, but he was always fully disabled.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. Now I know that you’re in a totally different department, but if you feel you need some advice on the condition, or point you to some very good genetic counsellors I am happy to help. I’d say my door is always open but they make us hot desk now, so it’s more a case of my inbox is always open. If you need anything, just pop me a message.”
“Thank you sir.”