No Control Experiments

[maggiekarp]

If Lavos was traveling to different planets to gather the best DNA, why does he interfere with evolution? Wouldn't that just cause the same planet again and again?

[Manly Man]

It's probably something along the same lines how we breed animals or cross-pollinate various plants. Lavos is aware that it can mix two things together, or twist the genetic makeup of what's there, and does so to get the best of both worlds, so to speak. For example, say one was to cross-pollinate a big boy tomato, a tomato that gets up to about two pounds, with an early girl tomato, which ripens about a month before any other tomato and tends to be hardier than the others as well. You'd come out with something that would produce sooner than most, and would also be great in size. Sure, it wouldn't be as big as the big boy or come as soon as the early girl, but, pound for pound, would produce an amazing amount of a very good composite between the two.

Lavos is doing this sort of thing with the rest of the planet's life, 'gifting' choice creatures with its power to create something wondrous, Of course, the result is something that isn't as natural as the rest of the animals nor as powerful as Lavos, but it's a creature that, eventually, 'ripen' into something that it would be able to make the most use of.

Zeal is an example of it going too well, however. Say you mix tobacco with roses, to get the insect-repelling qualities of the tobacco and the beautiful flowers of the rose. You indeed get just that, but it begins to overpower the rest of your garden and shrubs, smothering the other plants and stealing the rest of the nutrients out of the soil. The destruction of Zeal would be like Lavos uprooting these plants and using some weedkiller to get rid of the plant that's threatening the rest of its garden; Zeal was not only sapping from Lavos, which could be considered something akin to the plant happening to be poisonous, and that they're also repressing and slowly killing off the rest of the humans, which could be considered the rest of its 'garden.' And so, on those grounds, it expends just a bit more energy to rid itself of the metaphorical 'weed' of Zeal, and salvage what it can of the remaining creatures on the planet.

[Licawolf]

Maybe Lavos doesn't guide the evolution of the species strictly step by step, maybe it only interfers partially, allowing the species to developt as they would naturally do, getting adapted to their mediums as they would normally do, and only interfering in very specific ocassions when some feature that could prove problematic for Lavos own development appears (using the same example as Manly Man, when flowers start to developt spikes or when the plants start to become poisonous. For example Zealians), And also Lavos interfers too when a particularly useful (from Lavos point of view)  feature appears, then Lavos starts to accelerate it's development, giving it advantage, eliminating the possible competition (I'm thinking about Humans vs  Reptites here. Lavos changed the planet's climate causing the reptites to become extinct, giving the evolutionary advantage to the humans and other mammals, probably because they got more potential from Lavos point of view). I think half of the time, Lavos is just an observer of the evolutionary process, which is why humans were able to get out of its control and get problematic at times, otherwise Lavos could have just erased free will and intelligence out of the human gene pool and problem solved.

[Ramsus]

If you look at the timeline between the arrival of Lavos and the eventual Day of Lavos, it's essentially a history of physical technology triumphing over elemental magic through Lavos's own influence. Lavos fears advanced magic and machines functioning off of magical elements, since it poses a real threat to Lavos. It's only once magic and technology functioning off of magic has completely disappeared that Lavos rises to devour everything.

The reptites were an immediate threat. They had to be exterminated, just as the mystics had to be defeated and neutered of their magical powers millions of years later.

Likewise, the fall of Zeal is no accident. The Kingdom of Zeal was an offshoot in the wrong direction -- one that could eventually pose a threat to Lavos, so he eliminated it.

[Thought]

Simple: Lavos didn't interfer with evolution on the planet, at least not as presented in Chrono Trigger (the Frozen Flame is a different matter). There is one line, if I am recalling, from the NA translation that implies this, but the retranslation project shows that it is in error.

Here is the NA line:

So...since the dawn of time, it has
slept underground, controlling
purpose...

And the Retranslation version

It's slept underground and kept on making the          
the evolution of all life on this planet its own          
since ancient eras......?

[Syna]

Right, in the retranslation it's more like he's collecting DNA, which fits. Makes Lavos' aims much more cohesive.

What he uses that DNA for is not entirely clear to me, but maybe it has to do with strengthening himself to the point where he can reproduce.

The Frozen Flame does complicate this, especially the whole 'Lavos is responsible for magic' reveal. In Chrono Cross, Lavos made quite a misstep by empowering humans I suppose.

[Licawolf]

I always thought Lavos used the DNA to mutate itself and its spawns. Hence why it looked like such an strange creature, a mix of thousand and thousand of species from different planets. And I used to reason that Lavos looked so human in his last form because it had gathered the DNA from humans recently... but after meeting Starky in Chrono Cross, I guess maybe anthropomorphic shape is just a common way of convergent evolution in the chrono universe.

..also, I thought in Toriyama's head, the idea of a creature made up of mixed DNA's just had to look like Cell  

[Mr Bekkler]

Who says Chrono's planet is the first or only experiment? Perhaps the experiment itself would have been on some other planet a long time ago, and the Lavos we're familiar with is using a tried and true method by the time he lands on Chrono's earth.

Ramsus' comment makes the most sense to me, when is the Apocalypse? 1999, or the time when humanity was closest to technology and furthest from the planet.

And like Licawolf is saying, I don't think Lavos was necessarily trying to change humanity, rather, trying to figure out how to absorb human DNA into itself.

I don't know... great question... no real answer.

[Eske]

Ramsus is correct.  Lavos waits until none can challenge him and then arises.  This is shown by merely looking at the ruined future of 2300AD.  What it didn't count on was the actions of the Entity at the last second, summoning would-be heroes from across time, imbued with the very magical powers that it feared.