Jimmy <-- redeacted --> writes:

> I am fairly new to this list,

Welcome, Jimmy.

> Just to throw another wrench into the works, there is another race that
> doesn't belong on the planet it was found on, and Piper makes this fairly
> clear in a couple of paragraphs of Little Fuzzy
[snip]

Well, I'm just reading *Fuzzies and Other People* for the first time
(thanks to having recently come across it in a local used book store)
but it seemed pretty clear from the first two Fuzzy novels that the
Fuzzies had evolved on Zarathustra.  Federation scientists were pretty
much set on the hypothesis that the reason for the low Fuzzy birthrate
was due to a lack of the titanium compound (hokfusine) that counteracted
the hormone NFMp found in the Fuzzies.  (Hokfusine was found in
land-prawns and "extee three.")  The scientists had also hypothesized
that the hormone had originally served to combat an environmental toxin
that no longer appeared in the Zarathustra ecosphere.  Thus, what had
originally been a useful mutation (NFMp) had become a harmful one (which
hindered fetal development) when the environmental toxin disappeared.

Of course, this all may be explained some other way in *FaOP* or in the
follow-on, non-Piper works.

David Johnson                        Net: -- redeacted --
Arlington, Virginia, North America   Web: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~david
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"Why not everybody make friend, have fun, make help, be good?"
                                     -Diamond Grego (H. Beam Piper)
                                     *Fuzzy Sapiens*