On Marvel's Mutants and Biology

I'm a biology major, which is probably the only reason this occurs to me.

Apocalypse vs. Dracula. That's what put me on this path. I haven't seen a very positive response to it out here in the blogosphere, but Len at the store seems pretty excited for it. We were discussing Apocalypse on Friday and how Len feels Marvel just doesn't quite get what they claim Apocalypse's motivation is: Survival of the fittest. Len argued that Apocalypse wouldn't just kill a bunch of humans, he would use them, draw the bio-energy from the bodies, Matrix-style, so that they could be of some use to those more deserving of life than themselves.

Len discussed how Marvel understands the idea enough to use it as an excuse for a lot of mutant battles, supposedly to determine who is more "fit", but that up until now they had missed the other aspect of fitness: reproduction. Like one of my professors says, "The only things in life that matter are food and sex. You eat the food to get big and strong and get all the babes and have lots of copulations." Sadly, he's not the oddest person in our biology department. But he's right, producing offspring shows how viable your genetics are for the population, because obviously you survived long enough to reproduce, which other individuals can't say, for whatever reason (illness, sterility, death, unimpressive secondary sexual characteristics).

The reason this came up is because apparently we'll be meeting Apocalypse's offspring in this story. Len's theory is that Dracula is killing them, and Apocalypse is perhaps none too pleased with that. Which makes sense; Dracula is disrupting Apocalypse's propagation of his DNA. Plus, if he's strong enough to kill those 'children' (who knows how old they are), then he might be a challenge to Apocalypse's plans, so it might just be time to deal with that.

But still Marvel comes up short. Supposedly, they said that the first born is the one closest to Apocalypse, and therefore the most fit. This had me and Len, who's also in the bio department, both slapping our foreheads saying, "No, it doesn't work like that". The discussion of the children lead to my joke that they're the Gutherie family, which has at least four mutants, all of which have wildly different powers, and have no father in sight, at least none I've ever seen. But that's a discussion for. . . later today, I think.

DC doesn't seem to have an analogue for this, except maybe Ra's, but he seems less about survival of the fittest, and more just about reversing overpopulation. I figure it's because in DC, most powers seem to come from being an alien, or being involved in some sort of magic/accident/experiment. Maybe, I'm wrong, but 'mutants' seem much more rare at DC. Well, maybe they aren't more rare in DC after House of M, but prior to that, when mutants were following biological protocol and outcompeting normal humans, thus leading to their continual increase in numbers, to the point they had devloped their own subculture. Oh yeah, one more thing.

Who the hell told Disney they could make a sequel to Bambi?