An ichthyosaur
Roy Plotnick has another insightful post on Medium. This one is about evolutionary biology.
As a Star Trek fan, I appreciate the writers attempt to explain within their universe what were actually constraints produced by the need to use human actors and save on CGI. Personally, I don’t think it was necessary (don’t get me started on their contortions to explain changes in the appearance of the Klingons). But as an evolutionary biologist, I am appalled. Even given that the original DNA of all nineteen planets was identical, the odds that the end result billions of years later would be nearly identical interfertile hominid species is zero. In the context of Steve Gould’s Wonderful Life, each of these are separate runs of the tape of life. Given the length of geological time and the role of chance, and that the initial starting conditions of each planet are different, contingency dictates that the end results would be widely disparate. Even if, as Simon Conway Morris has insisted, the rise of intelligence is inevitable, a human would still have a better chance of producing a fertile offspring with a starfish than with some hypothetical Romulan.
