Humanoid
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
- 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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- T5 Core Rules
- Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master of Sophontology Maksim-Smelchak of the Ministry of Science