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Sorry if this is the wrong place for this.

So, on the Discord server we were shitposting about shrews, as one does. I jokingly said I wanted to try making a radially symmetric shrew, then went further to say it would be easier if I were to successfully evolve repeating segmentation first.

Well. I actually gave it serious consideration and wrote up a few paragraphs explaining how a shrew could evolve a whole extra pair of limbs in a single evolution, in a way that could lead up to the later evolution of repeating segmentation, by duplicating the skeletal elements of the thorax section of the body. I even went into a bit of detail about the limitations and downsides of the mutation, followed by why it was still ultimately selected for.

Obviously, I don't think it's very plausible. But Hydro never gave me a straight answer on it, and the closest I got to a "no" from anyone else was a "maybe, as long as you can explain why it didn't just die". Some people are actually strongly insisting I actually do it, citing that Sagan 4 Alpha has always been very soft spec anyway.

Can we have a serious discussion about this? Preferably with less "DO IT! DO IT!" and "Bring in the Shrewrew!" and more discussion about whether it would actually be allowed and the pros and cons of allowing it.

I do think there should be a intermediate species before this happens. One idea I thought of is see if we could create a species that undergoes genome duplication like with paddlefish. This would, while not inherently causing death, would lead to drastically reduced genetic stability. This way, it wouldn’t necessarily be a one-in-a-billion event, but the result of thousands of instability occurrences, which limb, organ, and tissue duplicates being uncommon but not rare. Something like a 1-in-100 event where some duplication occurs, and due to a high birthrate there would be multiple individuals spawned among the population each year.

I like the genetic instability transition idea. Just wrote the opening sentences for a potential transitional form:

QUOTE

The Scrambled Shrew split from its ancestor and got smaller, claiming the largely untouched smaller omnivore niche. It is named for 2 features: its tendency to scramble about wildly to evade predators, and the fact that its entire genome has been duplicated, resulting in massive genetic instability and a high rate of mutations which duplicate tissues, organs, and body parts with an occasional horrifying body-scrambling effect.

I'm tempted to swap the order of those 2 namesake traits to make it funnier

I've submitted the transitional form. I guess we'll see how this goes next gen.