Well, our lists have some overlap. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact. I spent a lot of evenings' jogging putting a lot of consideration into this, because it was a lot of fun to think about, and I hope the level of thoughtful consideration is self-evident. Here's what I've got: Otters: Friendly, social, mechanically-inclined tool users without anything we might consider a sociopathic streak. I can’t really come up with a criticism, other than sea otters’ penchant for rough sex, but you’ll find worse in any scum swarm. Probably offers to join in worse with twenty minutes’ seeking, tops. I’ve picked otters - under the project name Lutra sapiens - to write up as my first big contribution (well, with crunch anyway) for this board; they and their project will probably be roughly equivalent to two to seven days worth of Seedware or Farcast once I finish. Canids: Actually, I think dogs have some personality traits which make them a lousy sophont, even if they’re great companion animals. Some of the behaviors we value in dogs might manifest as retardation when a normal human sleeves an uplifted dog; you might get a great pod out of the project, or you might get a werewolf-shaped Frankenstein’s monster - which, I shall remind us all, initially ended up monstrous only in appearance, and became unpleasant only after some aggressive child abuse and neglect - the worst kind of abused innocence coupled to great might and cunning. If you were psychologically prepared, either via simspace, psychosurgery, or simply talk therapy, the result might actually be extremely pleasant, or at least hard to give up. (Actually, given the choice of sleeving a flat or a smart dog, the smart dog has much better bonuses! I can see making this kind of wehr-wulves being a thing done on certain scum swarms, with willing victims. Maybe - plot hook - someone offers it as some sort of therapeutic experience, but simply collects a pack of werewolves who more or less worship him?) Still, I’m pretty sure that traditional approaches would fail to produce independent, sophont uplifts. However, you might produce a pretty nifty slave race, which … on second thought, I can see why you’d use traditional uplift approaches now. What canids might produce more conventional measure of success? Here’s my guess: Foxes: Social, domesticated in shockingly few generations by Russian researchers, and they have a peculiar trait - they’ll raise each others’ orphans. Wild foxes aren’t hugely hard to tame, either - a lot of Youtube videos, mostly from Britain, manage to befriend their friendly suburban red fox while not destroying their ability to function in the wild. Coyotes: Also in the process of self-domesticating, as well as cheerfully hybridizing with any other canid species in the vicinity, coyotes are moderately social, very clever, and my ancient humanities professor accidentally raised a coyote pup when nobody claimed the “lost puppy”. Unlike Shreve Stockton of the Daily Coyote blog, she never had any more difficulty than any other puppy comes with, and they shared a long and happy time together. Grey Wolves: In nature, they display the same nuclear families as modern humanity favors. Ironically, I think we’d get along better with them now if we tried domesticating wolves anew, than our ancient ancestors ever did. Red wolves tend to be more solitary than forming tight-knit nuclear families, so a little (a lot?) of red wolf might be mixed into any wolf uplift. Domestic dogs, by comparison, show significantly different family structure marked by every fertile female breeding at every opportunity, rather than displaying any family planning instincts, and cognitively maintain neotenic features into adulthood. This brings me to… Werewolves: A hybridized canid, mostly red fox but easily cosmetically adjusted, that includes an enlarged, humanized brain, possibly relying on commercially available augmentations to bring their intellects up to transhuman normal. Meanwhile, I figure they maintain a body mass somewhere between a neotenic and a splicer, and an generally canine body plan. In spite of that, I suspect that they have modestly dextrous paws, and are better at sitting on their haunches than natural canids. Their personalities would tend toward timid-but-friendly; they’d be hard to approach but make great friends once you had established any kind of a relationship with one. They would tend to prefer flight to fight, and would have a knack for lateral thinking and skirting around problems, rather than directly addressing them. They might actually have an interesting profile if cognitively examined in a “multiple intelligences” context; they might be pretty dumb in some ways, but tend toward introverted-intuitive personalities under Meyers-Briggs. The IN-group tend to be rare in humans, and in teams, IN members tend to cause the team to perform as more than the sum of their parts. Felines: These have a distressing tendency toward sociopathy. Certain exhuman groups might enjoy sleeving partially-uplifted big cats - especially lions. While domestic cats display affection and care for their young to the point they will fight to the death, most felines’ casual cruelty and easy sadism makes them very bad candidates for uplift - or rather, will require the same sort of care given to turning orcas from the sociopaths of the seas into big, soft mamas’ boys. Lions are the worst - they eat their future mates’ young in order to get with them sooner, for crying out loud. Tigers, by comparison, are pretty chill, and will even let nursing mothers, or mothers with cubs, mooch off their kills without complaint or hesitation. They also have been kept as pets, and as far as I can tell, most of the time this goes bad is when the tiger thinks they’re being helpful Florida panthers, and other strains of cougars? As big cats go, they’re about as close to domestic cats as you can get. In spite of that, there’s an even better choice: Cheetahs: The ancient Egyptians considered them mostly domesticated even as they exist in nature, and were easily tamed for use as hunting hounds. They genuinely enjoy one another’s company, form deep and long-lasting friendships, enjoy group sex, and these pairs - often brothers - raise children of these orgies with no real concern for who the actual father is. Unlike most cats, they succeed at nearly half of their attempts to bring down a meal, compared to about 10% (though this is offset by the prodigious energy expenditure that a sprint represents) of other cats. They also tend to be polite and efficient hunters, and seem to wait for brain death (or at least hypoxic coma) before they start eating. For their strong social tendencies, and lack of scary personality traits, cheetahs are very likely the best feline candidate for uplift. Raccoons: Clever, tool-using problem solvers, raccoons are at least as good a candidate as hypergibbons for being made into semi-uplifted pods. The only thing that makes me hesitate to recommend them for the first of the second generation is an unfortunate tendency for baby-eating among the males of the species. More or less the opposite of cheetahs’ attitude toward babies, they don’t give a rat’s ass whose offspring the kits are, but tend to resort to precautionary cannibalism. This is probably significantly easier to address than orcas’ inclinations, however. Elephants: The only reason I can’t call them the best prospect of the second generation is because I’m pretty sure they’re first tier, even if you’d need to either duplicate some efforts, or go on safari for some well-preserved DNA back on Earth. Horses, Bears, Hyenas: Interesting, I hadn’t thought of them, but you’re right - they each have something going for them. Rats, Rabbits: I hadn’t considered the way the deep scientific understanding of their biology might constitute a five-to-ten-year head start. And a weird one that’s been sticking in my head since the National Geographic documentary? Leopard seals. Once thought to be vicious killers, it’s easy to frame some of the more extreme behaviors in anthropomorphic motivations. Pulling explorers into the water? Helping another awkward-looking large mammal struggle into the water, where they’re not helpless in the face of a hungry polar bear; when NatGeo cameraman Flip Nicklin was pulled into the water by a seal, the first thing she did wasn’t to savage him, but offer him to split a meal of a penguin. Fortunately for Flip, he’s an aquatic photographer by trade and had a thick wetsuit on at the time. I acknowledge that I am anthropomorphizing very hard right now, but leopard seals have historically been anthropomorphized in very different ways, and very recent footage paints a very different picture than the viewpoint that’s been dominant since… what, the early 1900s?

… I'd say the odds are good, and canon recognizes this. Did you know that birds are reptiles, and the current term of art for what you are taught are the reptiles in middle school is actually "Non-avian reptiles"? The More You Know!™ Smarminess aside, the line of reptiles that gave us theropod dinosaurs gave us avians, and we have video of a gray parrot using sarcasm effectively. I think it's safe to say that "bird brain" is not an insult any more. As for those reptiles that came up through the crocodilian line, tegus are said to make good pets, and have very catlike personalities, with all the ups and downs that implies. Still, I cringe at the thought of uplifting any R-selected creature, full stop, mammal or not. Krogans may be a good example of this, actually - they're actually an R-selected prey species. They don't really care too much about the intrinsic value of the lives of other krogans, as far as I can tell from fanfic and wikis. To the point that I suspect that the first step to uplifting rabbits would be to create a K-selected domestic rabbit strain, either through genetic engineering or selective breeding, and let them undergo a few centuries of evolution to let them become protective of their neighbors. So - what non-avian reptiles can we all think of that breeds slowly, cares for its young, and has significant social lives? I'm stumped, but I've been up far too late teaching my gaming group to make Eclipse Phase characters (so - it was for a good cause!) and I can't think too clearly at this hour.

Chernoborg wrote:

By the way, this image : http://deadliestfiction.wikia.com/wiki/Wolfen by Wayne Barlowe is generally how I envision canine uplifts as turning out.

First, I like the idea of sea lions. Second, I think I agree with you about canine uplifts turning out more canine than human, and though those forelimbs have potential for fairly fine manipulation, they're fundamentally compromised as far as digging and running - the intent is clearly to revel in the uncanny valley. The hindpaws are significantly more fragile than necessary, and claws are too small for traction. In spite of that, that's probably getting more right than wrong; I bet that canine uplifts would tend toward quadrupedalism, if they're supposed to fill similar roles to their unenhanced cousins. Still, small mercies, a more traditional werewolf form is only an hour in a healing vat away. :p Seriously, that's like a deliberately terrifying looking illustration of my mental picture of my werefoxwolfthings. I can also imagine someone banging together a low-rent pod version of those things for Halloween on Get Your Ass To Mars. :D

I actually used to follow that setting pretty closely. There's a little of that in here, but more of it is the standard software development process of dogfooding - IE, using your own product during development to force rapid gains in functionality and quickly squashing mission-critical bugs. That said, there's rather a lot of it in my description here, I suppose. Having said that, Orion's Arm has several different approaches to uplifting nonsapient creatures; some end up with human DNA spliced in, and others end up undergoing speculative, computer-simulated convergent evolution and end up with fundamentally different genomes, and (presumably) styles of cognition. Actually, it occurs to me that in certain technologies - biomorph resleeving and uploading spring to the front of my mind - are far more advanced in Eclipse Phase than OA, with no physics justification (such as speculative physics underlying FTL communication via quantum entanglement). In OA, one has to rely on a cyberbrain "mesh" for years while their new meatbrain learns how to think your thoughts, and the cyberbrain mesh isn't removed afterwords - a persistent, acknowledged hacking risk that's been famously exploited over and over again. "Backup implants" tend to take over the vast majority of your cognition, meaning they're not so much a backup, as a tiny cyberbrain, and still represent a single point of failure, albeit more hardened than a meat brain. Cortical stacks are, at least, redundant. Edit: Digging through NPCs created for my first EP game, Jamie Clarke's department at MIT has some colorful characters in it. An uplift or two, (Sapient-leaning dolphin and unspecified, presumed avian uplift from Fortean, currently sleeving a ripwing) and one guy is a self-professed mercurial exhuman (yes, he was born human) who turned himself into a troodon uplift via psychosurgery, after extrapolating a troodon genome and doing most of the uplift work in silico to figure out how their brains would be put together, and extrapolating again from there how they'd think as a result. Or at least, that's what he claims. ;) I was aiming for a sort of "lone gunmen" vibe off this pack, and while I never got a chance to use them, I had fun creating them.