QUARIAN BASICS
I know that this is just a video game, and you can easily conjure up wizards to do things that would normally be impossible but as they are presented, quarians don't make any sense. First of all, we are introduced to quarians as a tragic lesson of the classic robot-slave rebellion archetype. The quarians are the masters who have been usurped, and do to having to live in the sterile confines of starships they lose their immune systems and must spend their entire lives in a suit.
Ok, this seems plausible so far, because this robot rebellion must have happened thousands of years in the past and after untold generations the quarians have gotten sicklier over time. Except....it's been 300 years since quarians started wearing suits. Actually I'd argue it's been less like that since the quarians didn't all lose their immune systems the second they got onto ships.
Quarians seem to age similar to humans. After all we are told Tali is 22 in the first mass effect and she is "on her pilgrimage" which appears to be the life transition from youth to adult. Also Bioware clearly makes it apparent that Tali is an adult by 24 at least since Shepard can romance her. So therefore we can safely assume that quarians reach sexual maturity by at least 20 years old or so.This means that in all the time that has passed since the geth rebellion there have been at most 15 generations.
MASS (FOUNDER) EFFECT?
First let me introduce those of you unfamiliar with something called the Founder Effect, this is a loss of genetic variation that occurs when a very small number of individuals are separated from a larger population and eventually genetic drift will create new species if kept separate for long enough. This is important because a founder effect could explain the quarians weakened immune system, after all the quarians did suffer the loss of billions in the geth rebellion.
Now back to the quarians themselves we've determined that 15 generations has occured from the time the quarians were separated from their homeworld. Let us ask ourselves, can a population experiencing the founder effect mutate such a weakened immune system in that short a time? Well in a real world example scientist Dmitri Belyaev of the Soviet Union tamed wild silver foxes from 130 individuals in a span of 25 generations. This was a drastic change that occured very quickly which I think equates well to the quarians.
In fact it must be known that 1/5 of Belyaev's foxes were tamed in just 10 generations. So yes the quarians could have mutated that quickly...except, this was from a pool of 130 individuals. The Codex clearly states two things, the population of the quarian flotilla is 17 million, and that the quarians practice zero-population growth. This means that the quarians have had a population of approximately 17 million for the past 300 years. So this is quite a large population to have such a drastic founder effect.
Ok it's not like the quarians experienced a noah's ark disaster, where there were just a handful left alive. The quarian fleet has the same population as the nation of the netherlands. The dutch have a fairly homogenous population, and have had one for hundreds of years. Yet they do not show any drastic mutations, as a people.
And actually the quarians get around far more then the dutch did before the industrial age. They go on a pilgramage, they leave their birth ships and join up with an adult ship. This means that quarians as a people mix their genes with quite a bit of regularity. Also it has been established that quarians consider themselves regardless of their ship as "one people, one family" so they can freely travel between different ships. Also it is stated that quarians do not have strict dynastic legacies, even amongst the admiralty, thus implying that there are no internal restrictions to whom a quarian can breed with.
This evidence shows that quarians have not had enough time isolated, and have too large a population to have mutated such a weakened immune system that they must live inside environmental suits.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE GERMS ANYWAY?
Ok in the first game, people took for granted that ok, the quarians live in a sterile germ free environment on their flotilla and this causes their weakness verses infection. After all if they aren't exposed to germs how can they create a resistance to them.
Except, this doesn't make sense. First off it is damn near impossible to create a completely sterile environment. In fact in hospitals one of the most sterile places we can get 1.7 million people get sick from hospital-acquired infections or around 1% of all people who go there.
Now, lets stop and think about the quarians of the past, the first generation who fled from their homeworlds. I find it hard to believe that these quarians now reduced to being scroungers and having second-hand ships would be able to keep a hospital-level clean environment. This means that the quarians who created the flotilla had germs, tons of them in fact, and probably all kinds of different varieties, considering the quarians were scattered over dozens of worlds.
There's also this neat thing that germs can do and that is go into stasis for a very long time. Even in otherwise hostile environments, for instance a camera that spent 3 years on the moon came back with bacteria still alive inside of it. This means that these first suitless quarians would have all the germs of their homeworlds spread out amongst their flotilla. When they would go to trade/communicate/build on other ships they would swap germs, get sick, and recover. And even if they didn't have live germs, they could still be exposed to bacteria that crept aboard the ship.
On another note, in a real life disease like leprosy, 95% of the entire human population is immune to this disease, because our immune systems evolved to be immune to the illness. Even though the vast majority of us have never had any direct exposure to leprosy we still retained our genetic immunity from hundreds of years ago. How could the quarians have lost their inherited immunities so quickly?
So even though individual spaceships are isolated environments the people are not isolated from each other. The first generation quarians easily could have spread germs between each other and they would have to have, because it's nearly impossible for them to have eradicated germs from their ships, and again it is unlikely for quarians to have lost their inherited immunities in such a short time period.
YOU WANT ME TO PUT THIS THING ON!?
All right now is the defining attribute of quarians, their environment suits. In order for this to make sense we have to think, who were the first quarians to wear suits? Aethyta the matriarch-bartender on Illium makes an off-hand comment about how some species don't remember what quarians look like under the suits. This implies it's been at least longer then say a Turian/Human/Salarian's lifespan.
That doesn't make sense though! Quarians cannot have been wearing suits for that long because they had no need to. The first generation quarians lived without suits, as we can easily assume the second did, and more then likely the third. So how far down until quarians got sickly enough to wear environment suits? It's only been 15 generations at most!
I can understand why all quarians would have an environment suit, after all with their rickety ships it's probably a safe bet that hull breaches are common so maybe as the ships aged it became common practice to wear the suits at all times just in case. Now here is a reason why they are isolated from germs, not only are their ships sterile-ish but they're double isolated in their suits.
Unfortunately that idea too fails. See, the quarians are stated as taking turns working in the Liveships. Now there are only three Liveships, which contain ALL the food for the flotilla, I would think that these ships would be kept in like-new condition. Thus the chance of a hull breach would be minimal. So if a quarian was working there, they wouldn't have a good reason to wear their environment suit.
You can say that these suits are comfortable, and that quarians are used to wearing them but I can tell you one thing. They wouldn't be wearing those damn helmets all the time on their ships (you can put a helmet on in seconds in case of a hull breach). Also, the liveship workers would probably want to "air out" so those that are on the liveships would be in direct contact with germs and when their tours are done they would bring these germs back to their home ships. Thus they would maintain the same immune system they had when they first formed the flotilla.
So I can believe that cultural traditions of the past hundred or so years would have quarians for the most part always wear their environment suits in case of breaches, but they would have no real reason to isolate themselves completely from their environment because they would just get sick at a normal rate for their species.
AH YES "ALLERGIES"
This has to be the dumbest "answer" to the quarian immune system problem that Bioware has come up with. Okay, so the quarians don't actually get sick, they just get acute allergic reactions.
So the Quarian homeworld, Rannoch, did not have any insect analogues. This meant two things first that Rannoch lacked insects as vectors for spreading disease, and second that plants developed other methods for pollination.
First lets look at insects as vectors for disease, on our planet the top ten infectious disease killers are, respiratory infections, AIDS, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, meningitus and syphillis. Of these only malaria is spread by insects, and in fact malaria is spread by only one insect the mosquito. This means that a lack of insects has no bearing directly on any species immune system by itself.
However, the second thing mentioned was a lack of insects for pollination. Therefore plants on Rannoch developed a symbiotic relationship with large animals to spread pollen. Now this is somewhat plausible, after all the first known evidence for biotic pollination in plants occurs in the Triassic, when large animals certainly existed. However, large animals make for a very poor pollinator. All of the non-insect pollinators on earth, birds and bats, are quite small because they need to be in order to specialize for only certain groups of flowers. See pollen producing plants have to make sure that their pollen makes it to another plant of the same species or it wastes the energy used in making the pollen, this is called flower constancy. So you need an animal that only focuses on a few types of plants to make certain fertilization of the plants takes place. An ecosystem can support less larger animals so unless Rannoch lacks in plant diversity we can agree that this makes no sense.
Now this explanation that large animals (presumably referring to quarian ancestors) were the main pollinators, so that they adapted to the pollen contamination, thus weakening their immune systems because it would have been beneficial to have a lowered immune system. Okay, this is just stupid, we are told this lack of insect pollination thing as a segue into a sentence that says most viruses were partially beneficial like there is some kind of link there. This isn't bad science this is the absence of science. All right I can get behind the fact that viruses and their ilk (prions for instance) sometimes impart genetic information via horizontal gene transfer to an organism that may prove beneficial. However these are specialized viruses and are quite rare. Which means that having a weakened immune system to that one virus would make sense but what would be the evolutionary advantage to a more efficient cell metabolism if it meant that 99% of all other illnesses would kill you?
Also how are pollen grains at all comparable to viruses in terms of 'foreign contamination'. First off your body does not recognize viruses (in a way you are aware) until there are hundreds if not thousands of them in your system. However as anyone with real allergies can attest sometimes all it takes is a few pollen grains to elicite a reaction. Really if quarians really were the main pollinators on their world. They should have stronger immune systems, as it would be beneficial to just ignore the pollen grains thus making them immune to allergies. On another note, pollen grains make no sense as a vehicle for horizontal gene transfer, which is the only benefit to lowering an organisms resistance to disease, so it's a really poor reasoning for the quarian immune system.
So in a nutshell although horizontal gene transfer can be beneficial, pollen is unable to work in this matter. A lack of insects does not equal a lack of disease as only one of the major infectious diseases is spread by insects. Finally, quarians should actually have stronger immune systems because in such a world they would have evolved an immunity to allergies.
ADAPTING TO CONTAMINATION
In Tali's conversation with Shepard about the quarian immune system, you know the one that doesn't make any sense. She says that quarians don't get diseases but their bodies react to the foreign contamination. This seems to imply that quarians lack any innate immunity, which is what prevents humans from getting distemper from dogs, and what prevents cats from getting measles from humans. Seeing as innate immunity has evolved in all species on earth, I fail to see how the quarians would have been able to survive for so long without one.
We do know however that quarians have adaptive immunity because she says that when quarians went to other planets they would go through a period of mild illness before adapting. This sentence however seems to confirm the fact that quarians in actuality have stronger immune systems then most species. As it says that after a period of mild illness their bodies adapted, not that certain quarians would be on their deathbeds or die, or that quarians would be in a prolonged state of illness, but that "Oh you'll have a fever for a week and be all better". When Europeans first colonized America they were exposed to many new diseases, and it was expected that they would become sick from this, many died during this process and others suffered life shortening complications. This means that humanity suffered more by crossing an ocean then quarians did crossing star systems.
All this does though is confirm the idea that even if the quarians have no innate immune system, a possible but unlikely situation. Their hyper-adaptive immune system more then makes up for it.
IN CONCLUSION
So to summarize everything that we know about quarians:
Fifteen generations have passed since the geth wars, not enough time for evolutionary change.
Quarian population is too large and genetically diverse for such drastic mutations in their immune systems to occur.
It's impossible to have a completely sterile environment, and the first few generations of quarians would have had no need to do this at all.
Even if quarian cultural norms forces them to wear environment suits. They still would not wear them at all times.
Quarians actually have a highly adaptive immune system and appear to only suffer from autoimmune disorders.
The evolution of quarians based on their own environment as explained by Bioware is contrary to how evolution would actually take place in a world such as Rannoch.
Therefore I can say with utmost certainty that in light of all the evidence presented.
QUARIANS MAKE NO SENSE!!!
Modifié par cos1ne, 08 octobre 2010 - 09:56 .
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Isn't that a drastic mutation?
