Quote from: CainsSon on Apr 27, 2011, 08:59:21 PM
Actually, if the SJ's are ASEXUAL, as are the Xenos, there is no reason to assume they would understand human reproduction and if they are exploring biomechanics then these experiments make perfect sense. Also, how can it be odd to you that an intelligent creature not be able to understand an organism's lifecycle just by looking at it. Are we to assume the humans are ignorant in ALIEN? Because thats exactly what happens in ALIEN. In many ways that script isvery complimentary to alien... I agree 100% that it is a smart direction to take.
In answer to your first sentence...
we (intelligent humans) have been able to use modern science (especially Biology, Molecular Biology and Chemistry) to fundamentally understand the mechanism(s) of replication/reproduction across the diverse panalopy of terrestrial, organic Life. We don't reproduce asexually, but that hasn't stopped us from determining the methods and mechanisms employed by the countless organisms on Earth that do reproduce asexually. Nor has it prevented us from understanding the life cycle of inumerable organisms that, from our perspective, are bizarre and quite "alien". Furthermore, our knowledge encompasses the entire hierarchical levels in which Evolution works, from demes, to individual organisms, all the way down to the level of genes.
As to the rest of your reply...
My post was specifically targeted at the "Alien Harvest" script, so your discussion of the Nostromo team in the original "Alien" movie is besides the point. My argument was/is that the Space Jockey race, as depicted in "Alien Harvest", is counter intuitive to what we would expect of an intelligent, technological race.
However, since you did bring up the humans on the Nostromo...
The Nostromo's science division (Ash) was able to learn quite a bit about the Alien, despite only having a dead face hugger to study...e.g. outer layer of protein polysaccharides, it replaced it's cells with "polarized silicon", it's structure allowed for prolonged survival in adverse environmental conditions, etc. And that is just the stuff that Ash disclosed to Ripley. We (the audience) are given the implicit impression that Ash also knew that the facehugger had "impregnated" Kane with it's offspring, and that something bad was going to happen to Kane when the offspring gestated. Ash saw the "stain" on Kane's lung during the bio-scan, and evidentlly could put 2 and 2 together. If you watch the chestburster scene carefully, you see Ash being strangely observant of Kane, even before he goes into seizures. Ash also is the one who recommended fire (hence the flame-throwers) as a possible weapon against the Alien. So, while the regular crew may have been more or less clueless with regards to the Alien, the Science Officer certainly had "collated" quite a bit of salient data on the creature...and in a remarkably short period of time.
Yet, in "Alien Harvest", the Space Jockey's are either incredibly dumb, or incredibly lazy (or perhaps both). Despite having multiple human specimens to analyze and observe for an extended period of time (at least months, possibly years), they resort to MIND CONTROL (mental telepathy, I kid you not) in order to induce one specimen to insert his reproductive organ into another specimen's waste canal. Yeah, as if utilizing a waste canal as a locus for embroynic incubation could possibly be a successful evolutionary reproductive strategy. Apparently the Space Jockey's were interstellar engineers...but "rocket scientists" they were not.