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Author: SolipSchism

Apr 14th 2015 at 3:32:56 PM

This example is not exactly scientists; they're more philosophers, but their entire order is based around the absolute supremacy of causality as the driving force in the universe; they are disdainful of superstition and magic, and have spent 4,000 years studying and breeding for intelligence and reflexes. The result is a combination of AwesomenessByAnalysis and CharlesAtlasSuperpower. (Although to be fair, they ''are'' slightly physiologically different from humans after 4,000 years of isolation. It's noted at one point that it's very difficult for them to reproduce with normal humans, and all but one of the children produced by such a pairing in the series turn out physically or mentally abnormal.[[note]]One is completely, pants-shittingly insane; one is highly intelligent ''as a toddler'' and commits a premeditated murder against his brother because he wants to be the only child his mother loves, then successfully covers up his involvement; the aforementioned brother is mentally disabled; one is an EmotionlessGirl; and the remaining child seems more or less stable, although he is as hyperintelligent as his Dunyain parentage would suggest.[[/note]])

Literature:
* At the beginning of the ''Literature/SecondApocalypse'', the Dunyain are a monastic sect who hid themselves away in an isolated fortress at the end of the Apocalypse, 4,000 years before the events of the series. For that entire time, they have been training and studying and breeding their members for intelligence and reflexes, and they make a particular point of studying human emotions and their causes and manifestations. (In one flashback, Kellhus remembers using neuropuncture to induce emotions in a captive [[BodyHorror who had had his face peeled off]], so that Kellhus could study the facial expressions associated with various emotions, and the muscles used to display those expressions.) When Kellhus encounters "normal" society, he finds that he is able to [[MoreThanMindControl play their emotions like a fiddle]], and he [[ManipulativeBastard milks that ability for all it's worth]].

EDIT: That's supposed to be "Dunyain" with a circumflex over the "U". It will display correctly on a wiki page and should display correctly in a YKTTW write-up, it just glitches in comments.