Dealing with a hive mind race

[ScaryMJDiamcreep]

I'm thinking of having a race in my world where every birth results in identical twins, and only ever twins. These "twins" are two bodies that share a single mind, personality and identity. They can differenciate between the bodies, mainly by having one body dress in the opposite colour to it's "twin". The only two things I have certain in terms of abilities of the race is that they have increased resistance against psychic attacks such as mind control compared to humans, and that they are incredibly good at predicting trajectories, both of things they are firing/throwing and of incoming projectiles.

The main issues I have are why/how such a race would develop, how their societies would work, their relationship with human societies, and how to prevent them from being wildly unbalanced compared to a human of equal training and experience.

 

[Orc Knight]

I'd call it less a hive mind as the twinned minds. Hive minds tend to be more of an entire group bowing to one then linked twins. If you are aiming for a hive mind, there's usually one ruler over all and it makes the decisions and the rest obey ("As you command, my Queen!). Though with your idea, it can be anything from genetic, to magics affecting genetics, or the offshoot of tampering with either. A possible survival trait if they came from a particularly vicious world, so one could accumulate the memories of their other half if they split up for a rather long time. The memories come back and they can use at least some of them.

As for how to stop that from being unbalanced? It's kind of easy. Prediction doesn't correlate with actually happening. While true you can predict trends and it's like, reality (such as it is even in fantasy and sci-fi worlds and their blends), tends to pop up with regularity. They can cover as many bases as possible with their powers, but at the end of the day, not all of them will survive contact. And if there's a way to disrupt psychics, someones going to find it, just to make things harder on them. And you seem to have restricted them to projectiles, which doesn't cover a large are or massed fire weapons.

And if the twins are affected by the link, like one of them being killed, another weakness to take advantage of. Especially if it disorients the other.

 

[Night Gardener]

I 2nd the vote for "Twinned minds".

I'd think as a survival strategy from an evolution stand point, twins sharing an intense psychic link actually makes a lot of sense.

Without getting into a eugenics discussion...
You're biologically not competing with your sibling for mates in the sense you are genetic exact copies of each other. This leads to genetically-based cooperative behavior, as your twin would not be perceived as a threat in the competition for mates, unlike un-twinned siblings.

Genetically speaking, twins surviving into early adulthood would have twice the likeliness that their genetic copy (one each) of favorable adaptations will be able to pass on to the next generation. Death of one or both twins, means less effective genetics are twice as likely *not* to be passed on. Let that cycle run for a few hundred generations and interesting things would start happening. It would not take long (on a time scale of evolution) to see some radical changes/ enhancements over time in a population.

It almost sounds like their visual cortex and their (sorry, I'll think of it later) "hand-eye-body coordination" would be phenomenal if coupled to intuitive/psychic or hyper-calculated predictions of 3D space around them... not unlike birds, actually: Their brain calculations and minutia of adjustments based on tiny changes in external and internal sensory perception keep them agile at high speeds, accurate, and aloft. Not just birds have these enhancements, it's convergent evolution. I see no reason why your twins couldn't develop extrasensory hyper-sensitivity.

So, if you're looking for a Why This? explaination, that is a good place to start. Also, it sounds silly... but plant propegation comes to mind. Two cloned cuttings or seeds carry the traits of their parent plants. The parent plant produced them as a hybrid seed from pollination with another parent plant. Two copies of good genes, if propegated, would then produce 4 copies of good genes. 4 doubles again, and so forth.

Now, I don't know of their culture... but if the twins don't marry or breed with another twin set, then the math gets crazy kind of quickly. Make a Punnits Square with two sets of two twins, vs. Two twins with two not twins.

Also, are the twins always identical in gender expression? If not, quadruple your Punnits square.
If you look at it simply as an equation for distributing genetic material efficiently, it's not a bad idea at all.

 

[ScaryMJDiamcreep]

For the effects of one of the twins dying, I've got it that the other one gets super depressed and has a decreased lifespan, such that when a twin dies of old age, the other twin would die within a week.

As for the projectiles, it makes sense to me that they wouldn't be able to predict lots of them before they've been fired. They'd be excellent snipers and archers, they'd find an approximate area for something like a catapult or trebuchet, and for machine guns and the like, they'd be able to predict the first bullet, but after that, the recoil effects and the sheer speed would mean that their previous calculation is no longer true, and they wouldn't be able to make new ones in time. RPGs and things like a bunch of rocks being thrown from the same catapult they wouldn't be able to predict because inherent properties of the projectile make it not follow typical physics. Incoming projectiles are a lot easier, cause they're unlikely to change course, so it's possible to find points where the projectiles aren't going to hit.

And finally, for genetics, the two twins would always be genetically identical, right down to the last gene.
I haven't dealt with reproduction yet, as the source I based the race off was literally a few sentences from a CYOA, but I imagine that a single twin on it's own wouldn't be able to reproduce, and in terms of family and genetics, a pair of twins would count as only one person, as they technically are.

Also, explanation for the increased pychic resistance: the mind of the twins is sort of displaced, residing halfway between the two in a way, so it's not where attackers expect unless they've dealt with this race before.

 

[Futhark]

I have to go with Night Gardener on this. Being twins doubles the chance of producing offspring and cooperation between them increases the odds even more. I can understand that if one dies it could cause irreparable psychological and psychic damage to the other, but I can’t see any value in needing both in order to reproduce. From an evolutionary stand point, why require some DNA from one and some from the other, when the first can provide the exact copy of the second.

The increased ability to predict trajectories makes perfect sense. A human has excellent spatial cognitive functions because we have binocular vision. We see in 3D. We also understand time and are able to factor in variables in almost real time. It’s really quite amazing how the brain does this. Having two brains doing this, seeing in 6D (or would that be 9D?) would, I imagine, be exponentially more powerful.

How their society would work? No idea. Humans are all the same, yet there are so many different societies and cultures. To be helpful, the twins are seen as one individual that can be in two places at the same time. This would be my starting point. How they get along with humans depends on the story you want to tell. Historically, humans don’t play nice with others they perceive as different, but that said, your world, your rules.

I think your idea has great potential, hope I helped.

 

[ScaryMJDiamcreep]

You're completely right about it not making sense that both are required for reproduction, but like I said, I haven't got much in the way of source material to base this race off of, and I feel like the presence of the other twin is necessary, even if it's just something as simple as fertility is boosted in the presence of the twin.

 

[Futhark]

Could be part of the mind thing, a psychic convergence or some such to activate the fertility cycle or ensure a healthy conception.

 

[Night Gardener]

To clarify, each individual twin can pick their own also not-twinned individual for mates. I don't think it should require two twinned persons to mate with one partner for genetic efficiency as a rule... although, strictly talking equations, 2 twins to 1 singular reproductive partner genetically speaking wouldn't diversify the genomes in a population as quickly as 2 twins individually picking completely different non-twinned reproductive partners. Sorry if that was not articulated very well in my earlier post...

I would say that your twinned-culture may prefer twinned sets to mate with other twinned sets, if only because splitting up twinned sets into non-twin monogamous relationships could get confusing. Or maybe not if their psychic link can keep details like that straight. I imagine that each twin has a great deal of individual autonomy and individuality from their identical sibling, so they would develop different preferences or personalities... while still passing on identical genetic pools. I think that may be an important evolutionary decision to make in your writing. I would think that individuality is something that can be electively quieted in times of crisis. We have a flight or fight response. They might have a flight, fight or HIVE response to external threats. The ability to rev your twin mind psychic link into overdrive would be very handy indeed.

If you go the other route where it is literally one mind/memory and one personality split between two bodies, that would be terribly confusing to outsiders but only because it's so alien to our species' experience. Would the twins share the same name? Would one gain or lose weight or get diseased while the other did not? Do they feel each other's physical sensations or injuries?

I'm curious about the cultural details you're developing around either scenario.

 

[ScaryMJDiamcreep]

The source material that they're based off of is rather vague about this, but it seems most likely that the twins are one mind, memory and personality spit between two bodies. They definitely identify as a single person, and the only differences in name between the bodies is a little prefix that they give for each body so that it's easier for single bodied races to deal with them. So for example, if the twins were called Lily, one would be called Yin Lily while the other would be Yang Lily.

Another thing is that it gets rather uncomfortable for the twins to be large distances apart from each other, as it starts to cause a delay in the transfer of information between the two bodies, which can become quite deadly for them in combat scenarios.

Especially depending on how I go about reproduction for this race, it might not be possible for cross-species relationships to bear children.

The biggest problem I have with decisions for this race is that there's literally only one image, not all that big, as the source material the race is based off, and half of the stuff on there is irrelevant or being ignored.

 

[ScaryMJDiamcreep]

Forgot to add this, and now it's too late to edit my last post, but they're a race that values balance a lot, so a pair of twins would try to keep their bodies as similar as possible, so they eat and exercise so simultaneously that it's unnerving for single bodied races to observe.

As for the "fight or flight" response, they're a bit like some animals, where they have the "fight or flight", but they also have "attempt to intimidate". By synchronising the speech and movements of the two bodies, it will easily intimidate most animals, and the average human would at the very least take a step or two back. This takes the place of the "hive" response that you were thinking of.

Pain is one thing that their system does provide a disadvantage for, but I imagine that to make up for the increased sensory input, they have a way of dampening the effects on their mind.