The class' syllabus, quizzes and related links are online, and so are the study guide, a class wiki, and some student projects. It's pretty fascinating to get a glimpse into the ways in which some of science-fiction's weird creatures, including some of the most far-fetched ones, can provide insight into actual biology.

Top image is cover of Slonczewski's novel, A Door Into Ocean. [The Columbus Dispatch and Biology In Science Fiction Blog]

7. When one person displays a new and bizarre ability, that's the work of evolution, because survival of the fittest is making only the strongest genes survive. Actually, if there's only one person in the entire world who can shoot cherry-colored death rays out of his eyes, that's not evolution — that's a mutation. It's evolution if the cherry-eyebeam guy has a easier time mating with Famke Janssen than anyone else, and thus makes tons of babies, all of whom can do the red-eyeblast thing. Mutations are only the building blocks of evolution, not the result of evolution. Go back to school, Mohinder.

6. Evolution is puberty. In the X-Men, for some reason, bizarre powers always manifest themselves whenever they first start getting hair in new and unusual places. And it's always treated as though the person's development as an individual is a form of, or a manifestation of, evolution. It's like puberty goes hand in hand with the sudden emergence of weird new genes, and your changes as an individual is confused with the transformation of your whole species. I also love the idea that there's one X-gene, which somehow activates a whole range of powers, from heat-vision to being a chicken-man.

5. Creatures with totally different ancestors will end up looking sorta the same, just because. Biologist and science fiction author Joan Slonczewski says a big problem with most science fiction is that it depicts convergent evolution as happening all the time — that's why aliens look sort of human, and aliens and humans can inter-breed. In fact, divergent evolution is way, way more common than convergent evolution. Divergent evolution is when creatures who share a single ancestor — like, say, mammals — evolve to be very different from each other over time. You're not likely to get just one unique creature in an ecosystem, like the great worm in Dune. Instead, you're likely to get a diversity of creatures from one ancestor. Convergent evolution, when creatures with different ancestors evolve to be similar because they're filling a similar evolutionary niche, is much rarer. (An example of convergent evolution, says Slonczewski: birds, bats and flying fish.)

4. Your children will inherit your body-mods. Maybe the earliest evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) who believed in the idea of "soft inheritance," where you pass on your acquired characteristics to your kids. If your body adapts to circumstances during your life — for example, if a particular organ gets smaller because you use it less — then your children will inherit it. (That organ will be smaller in your kids.) In fact, only genetic changes are passed on. But that doesn't stop science fiction from presenting changes to a creature's body, or non-genetic adaptations that you make in the course of your life, as being heritable. (Lamarck's ideas are sometimes mischaracterized as, "if you lose a leg, you'll have one-legged children," but he wasn't that silly.) In David Cronenberg's 1979 classic The Brood, a cutting-edge psychotherapy causes patients to manifest their darkest emotions in their own bodies — and one transformed woman gives birth to monster children that she can control telepathically.

3. Humans could evolve overnight into a new species in just one generation. In Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, humans' junk DNA suddenly starts expressing, and certain people are strongly sexually attracted to each other. These chosen people's children, the ones who survive, are a radically different species from homo sapiens. And Bear shows how this is just like when homo sapiens suddenly sprung up overnight, nearly 200,000 years ago. The new breed of humans are super-intelligent and mega-awesome. But it's pretty unlikely that super-rapid evolution would happen within only one generation.

2. It's possible to de-evolve people with rayguns or whatnot. Because evolution is a straight line and always happens in totally predictable ways, it's also a reversible process. You just need the right "de-evolution" device, like in the totally radical movie Mario Bros., where Dennis Hopper's King Koopa, who turns anyone who opposes him into a primordial sludge. Or, in the Next Generation episode "Genesis," a mutated T-virus from whiner-in-chief Reg Barclay causes everybody on the ship to start devolving — including Captain Picard, who starts turning into a lemur/pygmy/marmoset hybrid. Because Picard's too multi-faceted a guy to devolve into just one type of creature. Something similar also happens in the Doctor Who episode "Ghost Light," where an evolution-doubting clergyman is somehow de-evolved into an ape.

(Which reminds me: How exactly did "Ghost Light"'s interplanetary explorer/surveyor character travel all the way across the galaxy to survey Earth, but manage to be unaware of evolution? Is Earth the only planet where creatures don't just stay the same forever?)

1. We can predict evolution and accelerate it with technobabble. Random weird things, like going really really fast, or getting exposed to weird radiation, or just eating some weird fish, will cause you to evolve 1,000,000 years into the future, like in that Voyager clip above. And then there's the totally AWESOME Voyager episode where the crew meets the long-distant descendants of Earth's dinosaurs, who are spacefaring and intelligent. Janeway deduces they're the great-great-great-great-grandkids of the dinos by asking the computer to predict dinosaur evolution millions of years ahead. Because, of course, evolution is completely predictable in a vacuum, and you don't need to know anything about enviornmental factors.

Many, many thanks to Liz Henry with the Feminist SF blog for helping me put together this exhaustive list of lesbian-dominated cultures in science fiction. Smug Sappho! There are way more than I'd expected.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. A weird virus on the planet Jeep kills all the men, and most of the women, and the women who survive are changed, gaining access to a sort of Jungian collective unconscious. Deprived of access to men's precious bodily fluids, the women start mating using a weird ritual called "deep trance." One reviewer was annoyed that all these women, who presumably aren't naturally lesbians, seem way too comfortable turning to lesbianism and don't seem to miss the men at all. Ammonite won the Tiptree Award for science fiction that considers gender themes, prompting also-ran David Brin to complain that he'd been robbed.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr. A trio of astronauts blast off into a mission around the sun, but a solar flare knocks them forward in time a few hundred years, to an era when a plague (again!) has wiped out all the men and most of the women. The surviving women reproduce via cloning, and a few of their girl-babies are dosed with androgens early on to make them grow up bigger and stronger. The three male astronauts are thrilled at the chance to be the only men on Earth — either to become patriarchs, or just to have lots of sex — but then it turns out the women rulers have no intention of letting the men live. They're happy without men around, and don't want to upset their groovy, stable society with annoying menfolk.

Walk To The End of the World and Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas. A horrendous gay male-dominated society that locks up women in breeding farms. But then a free lesbian society, the Motherlines, springs up and shelters the refugees from the ebil male society. And the nomadic, horse-riding lesbian culture has an... interesting way of reproducing. In a nutshell, they, ummm... collect semen from their male horses and then use it as a catalyst to reproduce themselves. Or as Liz puts it, "horsefucking lesbians."

The Marq'ssan Cycle by L. Timmel Duchamp. In the dystopian future of 2076, everything's run by lesbians, and somehow the world is still totally fucked. The novel pits the lesbian Anarchist Collectives in the Women's Free Zone against the evil Executive Class, which runs the rest of the world and is equally lesbiotic. Ideomancer explains:

Executive men are 'fixed', which means they are capable of reproduction but entirely uninterested in the act except as a mean to an end. They derive no physical pleasure from the act, which frees them to pursue their vocations and hobbies without internal conflict. Executive women are almost entirely homosexual, except when it is necessary to bear their executive men children-and it is a distasteful act: in Renegade, one executive woman speaks of the obvious perversion of heterosexuality-but there is a very strong prohibition against executive-with-executive sex: executive women are only to have sex with service-tech women, who are sometimes available during parties much as champagne and caviar are provided. Executive women are also taught self-defense against un-fixed men.

The Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski. The planet Valedon is materialistic and has a rigid class system, but its moon, Shora, is covered by a shallow ocean full of water-breathing lesbians who live in harmony (but don't have any goats.) The Sharers of Shora are pacifists and super-advanced biologists, who communicate across long distances by talking to the insects, and reproduce by parthenogenesis. They live in peace... until an army from Valedon comes to "develop" Shora. Here's sample dialogue after the army has taken a few Sharers prisoner:

"We seek our sister Sharers," Merwen said.
"Who might they be?"
"Lerion Nonthinker, Ronesha the Coldhearted, and Oo the Jealous, who were last seen with Valans on Nri-el raft."

The Wanderground by Sally Gearhart. A linked collection of stories about a future lesbian utopia, where women can communicate telepathically, not just with each other but also with plants and animals. They can talk to the flowers! And everyone lives in harmony with nature. The women raise children collectively and die when they decide to. Gearhart coined some fancy terms for the lesbians' non-verbal communication, including "learntogether" and "listenspread." In the book's final story, an old woman and her goat prepare to pass on together.

Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson. This is more like the traditional "spaceman visits a planet of all women" story, except that for once the women-only planet is explicitly lesbified. As Liz puts it, "The lesbian society is like OMG SPACEMENZ please fuck us." Similarly, World Without Men by Charles Maine from 1958 features a lesbian-dominated dystopia, which is saved by a man. Here's how the Feminist SF web page describes it:

In World Without Men, all the men are dead and the women perverted lesbians. The story explains that this was caused by feminism and sexual liberation. One man is created from frozen sperm and saves the society.

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison. Everyone in the ruling class is gay, except for a few "deviant" professional class hets. Cloning has replaced sexual reproduction as a means of carrying on the species, but a few women rebel and bear their own children. Heterosexuality is seen as "rather an unpleasant word," because heterosexuality leads to violence and aggression. And sports. By the end of the book, however, there's the suggestion that eventually society may stop conditioning everyone into mandatory homosexuality.

Shore Of Women by Pamela Sargent. In a post-nuclear dystopia, the sexes have been segregated: Lesbians live in the cities, while savage men lurk out in the wastelands. Every now and then, men come to "shrines" in the wilderness and "consort with the lady," meaning they have virtual-reality sex with a fake goddess. During these cyber hook-ups, the savage men are milked of semen, which is used for artificial insemination by the city women. A woman who murders another woman is exiled from the city, to a horrible fate in the wilderness of men. But there's a shocking twist: the men are so conditioned to worship women that when they meet one in person, they're enraptured instead of violent. So you see, cybersex can change the world after all.

Want more worlds ruled by lesbians? (And who doesn't?) Here's an exhaustive list of gay female worlds in lesbian science fiction.