Saturday 7 May 2011

Ontogeny Recapitulates Monstrosity

Watch how this video montage of our embryonic development goes through all your favorite humanoids ... fish-people at 0:08 ... lizard-people at 0:18 ... then dog- and pig-faced people around 0:21 to 0:23.

Is it too much to imagine that a strange science or wizardry could create such full-grown monsters by arresting the morphological development of the embryo at any one of these stages while continuing its growth?

Or that - building on a teleological folk-conception of evolution where human form and intelligence are the obvious goal of the whole process - an even more devious procedure would prolong the gestation of animals to the point where they take on human morphology?

The monsters, they are us.

4 comments:

  1. Or the cruel wizards who keep women pregnant for years as their fetuses become spindly, big-headed abominations.

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  2. This reminds me of another teleological tangent I saw reading a note in Crowley's 777 this morning (thinking of using the tables of correspondences for stocking a dungeon or something). At the end of Note 26, "Capricornus" in Col. XXXVIII 'Animals, Real and Imaginary', he says: "Note that the sexual instinct should primarily be regarded as indicative of the ambition or aspiration of the animal to higher things." Creepy monster sex conspiracy!

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  3. I even thought I saw bear-people right before the final human form.

    Thank you for that link; it ties into my own upcoming Mutant Future campaign quite swimmingly.

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