James Cameron's Avatar - a biological review
February 3rd 2010 14:31
Avatar is a big budget movie produced with state-of-the-art technology (in fact, Cameron had to wait for several years for the technology to catch up to his vision). Well, the result is stunning. Avatar takes place on Pandora, a moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system (the moon is fictitious, but the star system is real. At about 4.4 light years away, it is the closest system to our own). Pandora is home to many strange animals and plants. What's great about the film, though, is that these organisms are mechanically feasible, in the sense that such creatures could actually exist and could move the way that they are depicted. Apparently, Cameron hired real biologists to act as consultants for the creature designs, and the effect is wonderful. The plants, too, with their bioluminescence and reaction to physical stimuli. Pandora is utterly believable. Thing is, these organisms might well have evolved on Earth if initial starting conditions had been slightly different. It's not only that the Pandoran organisms are filling niches we would recognise of terrestrial organisms, but are rather similar to the organisms we have on our planet. The Thanator, the giant predator in the film, is quite like a lion, say, except much larger of course (it also has six legs, as do the other animals. I suspect that there's nothing particularly special about the quadruped configuration on Earth; it could well represent a "frozen accident" that was subsequently inherited by thousands of species. And insects, you'll note, do have six legs. Why not four? Or eight - which arachnids have. Or more, which is the case with centipedes and millipedes. We need not suppose that every quadraped was selected to have four legs, only that certain features of embryology constrain them to having four legs. My money is on the number of appendages being relatively variable wherever complex multiceullar life has evolved).
[ Click here to read more ]
The fearsome Thanator, prime predator on Pandora. Image from www.pandorapedia.com
| 99 |
| Vote |
Read More
Add Comments
