Worm Sign: The Genetics of Dune

Its suggested 'race' is blended toward some average in Dune, but humans here on earth were not twenty thousand years ago who they are now. The Tswana males in Africa originate from the ancestors of Toltecs and Aztecs. The Iroquoi females share a common ancestry with Ancient Briton females.

Our ancestry is so unrelated to how it is now that the very ideas of race as we think of them are fundamentally false. The long term genetic isolation of groups results in dominant genetic trends in those isolated groups taking hold.

For the Freman, a people described as a lighter olive skin to Atredies darker Olive skin colour would have come with a lighter bone mass that would have evolved because those who are heavier would attract Worms and thus would be eaten. They would have a greater sense of vibrations caused by approaching worms, through a form of motion sickness, L wave detection, or auditory pressure sense. Heavier bone mass people like Paul Atredies walking amongst them would seem 'wrong' or 'dangerous' alerting their brains to his presence, even involking a paranoia or hostility to the unsafeness of his 'loud' presence. The modern Freman would be as light as elves, compared to the heavier bone mass of off-worlders like the larger and heavier Atredies. The Freman legs, hips and spines would have adapted to the capacity to generate a random gait for long cross desert movement, the muscles able to shift the position of bones, or the gradual damage for doing so would atrophy the body over the years until the elderly could no longer manage a random gait, and pose a problem with their inability to make desert crossings safely.

The Atredies on the other hand were being genetically groomed by the Bene Gesserit and had been for thousands of years. If they are breeding toward producing a super being or god, they are not breeding for Tom Cruise clones, they are aiming to produce giant gods who can look down on little people from their imperial thrones and loom over them on the battlefield. Gods who can be easily recognized and differentiated from the huddled masses around them.