Chu Chu is not available for work period because Chang'an is giving her remedial Scholomance lessons or something so Wei Wuxian decides to go hang out with his other best friend.
"Hey, Masozi! Want to study together in the reading room?"
Chu Chu is not available for work period because Chang'an is giving her remedial Scholomance lessons or something so Wei Wuxian decides to go hang out with his other best friend.
"Hey, Masozi! Want to study together in the reading room?"
"Magic seems to be weird and non-reductive and we don't understand it. Yet. I'm going to understand it."
"Yeah!" Masozi bounces a little. "...Oh right, I had a question for you. Ayako said I should ask you what 'evolution' is? Apparently it's got something to do with why people think sex is interesting."
"Okay, so, you know how people are like their parents? They look like them and act like them and stuff?"
"...I don't think I act very much like my parents?" And Lan Xichen isn't like his parents at all but Masozi is not going to bring that up just now. "But - yeah, I guess I look more like them than I look like random people in Malawi."
"So there's this code throughout all your body that tells your body what to do-- like, it says 'toe goes on your foot and not growing out of your ear' and it says 'Zaizai's skin should be darker than Wei Ying's skin' and it says 'when you're stressed produce this particular brain chemical,' all of that stuff. It's called genes."
Masozi frowns for thirty seconds, mulling this over, and then lifts his head and beams at Wei Wuxian. "Oh! That - so it's like a book in a different language? A language that whatever your body's made of can read? ...Can I learn to read the code, is it harder than Mandarin?"
"Aww. But - something has to be able to read the code, right? For it to make things happen the right way instead of just sitting there not doing anything? Like how if there are instructions in a book to make an artifact, someone has to follow them, if no one follows them then there's no artifact, just the book..."
"Your body knows how to read the code, but people can't. --You get half your genes from your mom and half from your dad. That's what come is, there are a bunch of little copies of half of your code and then if it meets an egg inside the woman's body she gets pregnant."
This is going to earn him SUCH a baffled look from Masozi! "But - people don't make eggs? Chickens and stuff make eggs."
"Women make very small eggs that stay inside their bodies and don't come out. Like, the size of the dot a pencil makes small."
"Huh! That sounds really...fragile? - Wait. Do chickens have the same thing, where come is what has the code from the father's side? How does that get into the egg, then? Chicken eggs have shells!"
"My guess is that it gets in before the egg develops its shell but I have to admit I don't know much about chicken reproduction."
"Maybe the library has books about it! How about frogs. Their eggs are all squishy. ...They're not very good to eat. Not like chicken eggs."
"Anyway. Evolution. So some people are more likely to have kids than other people, right? Like, some people die young, or are super hot so everyone wants to have sex with them, or really like babies, or do a better job of taking care of their kids, and they get more kids and more grandkids."
"So that means that there are more of their genes in the next generation. And on average each generation has more and more of the traits that make them better at surviving and reproducing."
"Huh."
Masozi holds very still for thirty seconds or so while he appears to concentrate intently on thinking about this.
"And - frogs and chickens do this as well, right? Do cockroaches and beetles do it? ...Do trees and grass do it?"
"- Oh! Is that the thing that maybe happened to me on Monday, if it wasn't someone trying to poison me? ....I think it probably wasn't or they'd've tried something else when it didn't work, right?"