If Cylons have these enzyme sacs at the ends of their spines, along with whatever else is necessary to trigger them, plus whatever else is necessary to make "the right things happen", these are biological differences from humans that are not merely on the molecular level. Period. Which is all I've been saying.
You’re assuming the glowing spine must be caused by something obvious that could be spotted by a cursory and non-invasive
No, I assume it could be discovered at least on dissection. Following discovery, a non-dissective test for it could be devised.
We’ve never seen a human see the glowing spine, we have no way to know if a human has ever seen the glowing spine,
Right. So we can either think they know about it, or don't. If they know about it this doesn't jibe with their helplessness about distinguishing human-Cylon biology. If they don't know about it, despite several folks having sex with Cylons, and Cottle dissecting one, that is strange. And that about covers it.
Dead Cylon is probably very unlikely to have the glowing spine thing.
Right, but it would still have the enzyme sacs or whatever the mechanism was.
If you don’t know that the best you can hope for is to find a couple of weird organs that secrete something that appears completely pointless.
Sure, but if they had at least found weird organs that secrete something, organs which humans don't have, this would be a biological difference.
If you didn’t want them to explain it it wouldn’t be on your list of “inconsistencies”. when you complain that you don’t know how it would work that’s wanting it explained, that’s asking for midichlorians.
I'm not complaining because I don't know how it would work. I'm complaining because (for some of these) there is no possible way it could work. The difference between this and Star Wars is that Star Wars is fantasy and the Force was essentially magic, and one accepted it on that level. But BSG from the start never purported to be fantasy, it was supposed to be gritty, realistic science fiction. If what you're saying is that I just should accept these things as 'magic' in the sense that one accepts the Force in the first 3 SW films, well fine, but that radically changes the BSG universe. For the worse IMHO. Being forced to accept things as magic makes me like this show a bit less. This is precisely my complaint!
How could you have loved the first two season? Half your complaints date back to the first half of the first episode of the mini-series. Glowing spine goes all the way back to the start, why is that so bad now when you loved it the first season?
Because when we were first exposed to things like that, a logical resolution still seemed to be in the realm of possibility. Glowing spine = ok, because at that point I had no idea what Cylons were under the skin, for all I knew they were mechanical. Glowing spine + being told that Cylons are biologically indistinguishable = not ok. Get it?
You're right though that it's not as if the first two seasons were perfect in this regard while the remainder have not been. Things like this did pop up and start to bother me in the first two seasons, it's just that for me the good still outweighed the bad at this point. Ok?
Well so far none of the supposed inconsistencies you’ve complained about exist.
Of course they 'exist'. It's just that you think logical resolutions for them could be cooked up, as you've labored to do here. I am not so motivated, therefore they bother me.
But you’re still talk small stuff. You’re talking about the possibility of two appendix sized organs (which when healthy is about the size of the last knuckle on your pinky) somewhere near or possibly IN the spine, said organs would need to connect to one or more of the primary systems in the body. They could very easily just dump their enzymes into the blood stream, so you’re “plus whatever” could be absolutely nothing. All I’m saying is there’s nothing about bioluminescence that makes it necessarily easy and obvious to detect like you’re assuming. Sure MAYBE if Cottle had cracked open every single bone in the body of their Cylon corpse he MIGHT have found a couple of odd thing, IF he didn’t accidentally break the things in the process of the search. And there’s no reason to think that even if said things were found and deciphered it would be at all useful for finding live Cylons.
I’m saying you should just accept these things. All of them have a certain level of plausibility. We KNOW creatures can be modified to make bioluminescence with minute enough changes that they’d be very difficult to detect if you didn’t already know what to look for and the differences wouldn’t be useful to identify live modified creatures from their original no-glow counter parts. This is a known thing from our own genetic experimentation and study of bioluminescence. Given this known quantity there’s no reason to assume Cylon spine glowing is any different, and therefore not useful as a Cylon detector. We KNOW human synaptic processes are similar enough to electricity that they can be detected and modified electronically, we’re already working on data transmission directly to the human mind this way. Thus Cylons controlling the base ships this way isn’t a big jump from technology we’re working no right now, and there’s a theoretical possibility of long range detection and capture of thoughts for download into another host. Also it’s not that terribly new a sci-fi concept, cloning and memory implantation has been around for a while, all BSG really added was the upon death semi-instant thing.
None of it is magic, it’s just slightly outside the realm of what’s known but not entirely outside the realm of what we already do theorize with what’s known. If you need more explanation than that then you’re asking for Ron to do something he hated doing on Star Trek, stupid tech talk using made up words. Known science tells us this stuff might be vaguely possible sort of. All you need to do as an audience member is accept it and move on. Honestly these are much smaller leaps than telepathy and hyperspace in B5, neither of which are even vaguely supported in the science of today or even the science of now.
But that was first season, you LOVED the first season yet in the first season is when they gave you glowing spines + Cottle can’t detect them (it really wasn’t not biologically indistinguishable, it was not detectable by that doctor with that equipment in those circumstances). And again who knew to even look? That’s what you’re refusing to get. You’re giving them knowledge they didn’t have then saying Ron screwed up because they didn’t do anything with that knowledge that they didn’t have. Cottle didn’t know about glowing spines, he didn’t know to go over everything near, attached to and inside the spine with a microscope to look for the slightest minor anomaly. And keep in mind the timing too, just how long do you think Cottle had, looked to me like hours at best, that’s enough time for a basic autopsy type thing, poke around in the guts see that all the major organs are there, see there aren’t any big organs you don’t know what they are, go through the basic liquid and tissue test to see that the blood is human blood the bile is human bile the tissue is human tissue and that’s about it. He didn’t get time for a full dissection of every single organ and every single bone, that’s months worth of work, months without him doing other normal doctor work.
I haven’t labored at all. These are all painfully obvious explanations, that you just don’t want to accept because accepting them mean you’re wrong they aren’t inconsistencies. And it seems very important to you that BSG has MAJOR HORRIBLE inconsistencies. don’t know why it’s important to you but it’s obvious at this point they’re all coming straight from you, not from anything on the screen. You’re refusing to accept that these things are not very far from known science and simply move on. You’re assuming that when Cottle says he can’t tell the difference it’s because he’s cracked open every single organ in the Cylon corpse and full perfect lab conditions and found no differences. You’re making too many assumptions.