Quoted By:
The Cylons of the 2003 miniseries and current Battlestar Galactica series are fundamentally different from the Cylons of the original 1978/1980 series. In the new version, the Cylons were created by humans as robotic workers and soldiers. As in the original series, the Cylons destroy almost the entire human civilization, chasing a few ship-borne survivors into deep space. Unlike the original series, however, the reimagined series includes twelve Cylon models who are nearly indistinguishable from human beings. Although these human-form Cylons are the focus of the series, alongside the humanoid models there are also Centurions similar to those in the original series. Much of the Cylons' technology is based heavily on bioengineering and/or synthetic biology rather than conventional robotics. Humans often derisively refer to Cylons as "toasters", due to the resemblance of the Cylon centurions from the first Human/Cylon war (the design of which is based on that of the centurions from the original series) to "walking chrome toasters", as described by Gaius Baltar in the miniseries.
In contrast to the reason for the original Cylons' genocidal mission, religion is the primary motivation of the Cylon race in the re-imagined series. They consider humans to be sinful and flawed creations of God that therefore do not "deserve" to survive. In the original series the Cylons, an aggressively expanding empire, declared war on Humanity because they intervened on behalf of a race of beings called the Hasaris who had been enslaved by the Cylons and who had sought the aid of the Humans. This history was retold by Adama when arguing with the new Council of Twelve.