Do the Borg evolve? I think they must, but Star Trek scenariowriters simply never took their creation serious. If they had, I think both ST TNG and ST Voyager would've looked vastly different. The writers would have realized that StarFleet is actually the stupid, backward side, where as the Borg are cutting edge, innovative. The magic word: evolution (evolution).

 

It doesn't make sense for the Borg to have one Queen. If they were just one colony, yes. But the universum is huge, to say the very last and they ought to be all over the place. What do Star Trek characters always so about the Borg? "They adapt!" A stranded drone, left to itself, should have a crash program, simply telling to make do with whatever its present habitat offers. Seven of Nine clearly adapts wonderfully, but she is as Borg as ever.

 

If they writers had taken this serious, they would spotted a real Paradigm Shift. A move away from 2500 years old physics and (associated) philosophy, to biology, Darwin and evolution. To a future where computerchips aren't made, but grown, maybe on an actual tree. A future where energyweapons are old and dated, and people fight instead with, say, butterflies that set off a biochemical chain reaction to destroy the executive function in an entire nation, so that the agressor gets a whole population which cannot keep track of time or prioritize. Won't they happily take their medicine!

 

Borg which do evolve simply look different. They're not mechanical. Borg is short for cyborg: flesh + machine. We know evolution can be applied to everything. Machine isn't just an add-on to flesh, I guess it wouldn't even work if it was. They would look far more like creatures. Only because we can't come up with a credible alien, when the universe presents us with countless environments and the one tool needed to work it out.

 

(it's easy to defeat a Borg... use a flamethrower. Crude, but effective.)

New research on Autism:

 

 

[...]

 

"According to the new findings, people with Asperger's play the game just as a nonautistic person would, but they lack the characteristic "self" signal in the brain. Normal people lack the signal only when they think that they are playing against a computer, suggesting that autistic people view interactions with other people similarly to the way that normal people think about interacting with a computer."

 

This is terribly important! Yet... What if there was a cultural component in the rising number of people diagnosed with autism?

 

I don't mean any way whatsoever that diagnoses are wrong or unjustified. Absolutely not! But this is my hunch: autism is a social disorder. Many autistics seem to benefit from structure and predictability. They find it hard to make this for themselves. Can get quickly overwhelmed by impressions and daily life. So the outside world is unpredictable and unstructured, in spite of all the rules en regulations. 

 

I think that previous societies - especially pre-1914 - in the West were more structured, stratified, and more predictable. Would some autistics have fared better in these societies? We now all sorts of help today, when in those times there was nothing, I know. But still...

 

I'm well aware that a lot of people diagnosed with any kind of autism marry, have kids and a fixed job or tenure. But what was it like back then? Were there autistics in the past? Sometimes some historical character is diagnosed in retrospect with autism. But would he or she have passed the current testing? Why on Earth is it, besides better diagnostics and widened (vaguer) criteria, that we - affluent as hell - would find ourselves with a rising number of autistics? Or are we just at present rich and sensitive enough to pay attention and notice the disorder?

 

Questions, questions... the question makes me uneasy.