Two Different Approaches To Changing Life, And Neither Worked

It's been over a month, but I wanted to get back to writing about the Cosmic Marvel events of recent years. When I started, I was talking about how Annihilation and Thanos Imperative mirrored each other, but couldn't decide how Annihilation: Conquest and War of Kings fit in to the "life vs. death" struggle.

I still haven't resolved that, but I had a thought on how the two middle events compare to each other. In each case, the story involves a major player trying to make a major change to life in the universe. Black Bolt planned to spread Terrigen Mists across the universe, the idea being everyone would become an Inhuman. Ultron was looking to combine what he considers the superiority of artificial intelligence, with a perfect organic body (Adam Warlock), thus overcoming the limitations of organic and artificial life.

Their goals are different, with Black Bolt hoping that if everyone is Inhuman, they'll all stop fighting and destroying entire planets. Ultron's goal is to have an entire troop of Phalanx in perfect bodies at his command, so he can go back to Earth and a) kill lots of people and b) prove decisively that he's surpassed the beings that created him. Black Bolt's willing to carry out this plan even though it'll kill him, while Ultron's plan demands he be in charge (he even requires everyone to refer to him as "Great Ultron").

There's also a vastly different amount of thought behind the two goals. Black Bolt's plan seems to have been conceived of desperation, without much thought to the practicality or logistics of it. Why will making everyone Inhuman stop the fighting? The Shi'ar have fought amongst themselves over who will rule. Pink and blue-skinned Kree have demonstrated hostilites towards each other. The Inhumans had a front row seat for years of mutant-on-mutant violence between Xavier's groups and Magneto/Apocalypse/Sinister/etc. Plus, he already knows the Mists have no effect on the Kree, so who is to say it'll work on the Shi'ar, the Badoon, or anyone else? Then there's the question of how for the Mists to spread throughout the universe, and what other species are going to do when they find out Black Bolt's made this decision about all their existences without consulting them, there's just no chance it was going to work the way he wanted.

Ultron's plan, while less noble, is better thought out, probably because he's worked towards it for years, though it involves some fortuitous happenstance. Ultron's taking a scientific approach, trying out different approaches and seeing how they do. As one fails, he tries another. Hank Pym created him, but Ultron moved beyond the programming, looked upon purely organic life, and found it unsatisfactory. He tried purely artificial (depending on whether you consider using organic beings' memory engrams as a mental blueprint artificial) a few times, and it's never produced a satisfactory result. So scratch it off, try combining his intelligence with an organic form hospitable to him (Tony Stark with his Extremis virus). There's potential, but Stark is still too flawed. Then Ultron's programming, transmitted into space, meets the Phalanx, themselves a combination of artificial and organic life, since they're organic beings infected with the Transmode virus. In a sense, a mass scale version of what he did to Stark. Again, there's potential, but it isn't enough. The Phalanx have no drive, no purpose other than to absorb, and eventually be destroyed by the Technarchs that inadvertently create them. So Ultron takes control through force of will, and sets it up so certain useful individuals brought into the Phalanx will retain the characteristics that make them useful. Now you have Phalanx that still tryo to assimilate everyone, but don't erase what's unique and useful about those they take. Even so, there are still flaws in the forms those Phalanx Select inhabit, and that brings Ultron to the High Evolutionary, and the plan to transfer the consciousness of the most important Phalanx into the artificially-created perfect organic bodies the H.E. designed.

So one plan hinges around a single great event, a catastrophe depending on one's perspective. The other was the result of years of trial-and-error in trying to demonstrate the flaws in trusting natural processes to guide the development of life to the best result. There are a couple of ideas in evolutionary biology about the development of new species. Phyletic gradualism says that species are always adapting and evolving in response to their environment, and given sufficient time, they'll become new species. Punctuated equilibrium suggests that a species remains largely the same for long periods of time, until some event causes the species to split into two in a relatively brief (geologically speaking) period of time. It's not perfect, but Ultron's gradual shift in approach could be compared to phyletic gradualism, while Black Bolt's abrupt decision to change everything would hew more closely to punctuated equilibrium. I don't think it's a perfect comparison (I also considered comparing them to the geologic theories of uniformitarianism and catastrophism, but it seemed better to stick to biology).

That neither plan actually worked as hoped, well, that's interesting. I'd say it suggests one can't force change on that scale, but humans have been shaping the development of different species for a long time (going back to at least selective breeding of domesticated livestock). There are false starts in biology, though. Most genetic mutations, if they change anything about the organism at all, don't convey a competitive advantage. They're more likely to cause an important organ or cellular process to fail. I had a professor who told us once that dinosaurs didn't die out while small mammals survived necessarily because the mammals were superior competitors. If that had been the case, he argued, the mammals would have taken over ecological niches without needing dinosaurs to suffer mass extinction. His answer was the mammals were lucky. They couldn't out-compete dinosaurs the ways things were, but conditions changed, and the changes favored the mammals.

Better to be lucky than good, and maybe that was Ultron's problem (I don't think Black Bolt's plan failed because he was unlucky, so much as it was just a bad plan). Richard Rider made it into Kree space before the bubble went up, and was able to escape thanks to Gamora killing Ko-Rel (which surely seemed like a good thing for the Phalanx, eliminating someone who could remove a valuable weapon of theirs like Nova Prime) and thus returning her bit of the Nova Force to Rich, which enabled him to get out from under the virus' control and escape to get help. Just little things in terms of timing or decisions that cost him, more than any massively huge flaw in his plan.