User:Jimbo Jambo

Welcome to my userpage, where I explain nothing about myself, save for this introductory paragraph. At the moment I'm using this as a brain dumping site for ideas which don't fit anywhere else.

Under construction

On Pikmin Biology

Pikmin being the product of someone's imagination, nothing can be said about them with any real degree of certainty, but much can be inferred from their behavior and what little information is slipped to us from in-game dialogue. Actually, in a way, the lack of real canonical information on creatures into which an enormous amount of thought and detail were obviously put makes studying Pikmin a bit like studying real animals in that nature has no guides or definitions, so it is entirely up to us to make sense of it.

Family Tree

In the absence of fossil or genetic data (I could not expect Nintendo to put that much thought into it), I've constructed a family tree of Pikmin and relatives based on observable differences and information given to us from the game.

Immediately worthy of note is the fact that I placed everything in the plant kingdom, not animal or some new kingdom, with Pikmin and relatives making up their own phylum. Though Pikmin have some animal-like features and abilities, such as free locomotion, what differentiates animals from plants is often not so much what they have, but what they don't have that plants do, such as chlorophyll photosynthesis (save like one or two species of animal plankton). Whereas evolving such things would require a great leap from animals, things like self-driven movement and sight, if even only in some bare, basic form, are already possessed by more than a handful of plants. Not only that, but certain features such as Pikmin flowers which seem to serve no purpose could be considered throwbacks from a plant origin.

As for the distinction between subterranean "Candypop-only" Pikmin and Onion-dwelling ones, much is just speculation. The absence of White and Purple Onions does not necessarily mean none exist, nor that White and Purple Pikmin are designed to be subterranean, but the fact that both have pink flowers seems to suggest a common ancestor which diverged from the rest of the group some time ago. Despite that, they still share many similarities, and it may turn out with further evidence that they are no less close in relation to Reds, Yellows, and Blues than those Pikmin are to each other.

With the generic separation of the other Pikmin in mind, I felt the need to further separate Bulbmin from the rest of the group, so I created a subfamily for them.

Subpages

See User:Jimbo Jambo/notes for ship part notes.