Humanoid

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Humanoid is a body plan, a basic description of the body structure of a single creature. Because of the wide spread of Humaniti the human body plan has become a standard.

A humanoid body plan consists of an solid, unsegmented abdomen with two legs and two arms ending with hands as manipulators, and a head. The head contains both brain and the main senses. The overall layout is bilaterally symmetric, meaning a left and right side of the body. Finally the overall body has an upright structure, with the head at the highest point atop an upright abdomen.

Description[edit]

A body plan is a set of morphological features common to many members of a phylum of creatures used by biologists, exobiologists, and sophontologists among others. The vertebrate body plan is one of many: invertebrates consist of many phyla. This term, usually applied to creatures, envisages a "blueprint" encompassing aspects such as symmetry, segmentation, and limb disposition. Evolutionary developmental biology seeks to explain the origins of diverse body plans.

The term is relevant to body-form only and has little use in science. There is no genetic relatedness that can be implied from similar form. e.g. A slug (non-Humanoid) is more closely related to a Human (Humanoid by definition) than a Vegan (Humanoid) is. Humans and Vegans arose from entirely different ecologies.

The term confluence is a measure of closely related the body plan of two unrelated species are. Confluence is always in relation to selected baseline, so human confluence is how closely the body form resembles a human's, or how Humanoid the body plan is.

Related terms[edit]

Semi-humanoid
This is a creatures with most of the features of a humanoid body structure, but with a few obvious and external changes. Examples would include
  • Sydite, with 4 arms instead of two.
  • Vegan, who have tentacles at the end of their arms, rather than hands.
Non-Humanoid
A creature with few, if any, of the humanoid body features. This is a broad category indicative of the Humaniti-centric view of the term.

See also[edit]

Sophont[edit]

References & Contributors (Sources)[edit]

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