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Aedan_Uaine wrote:

Okay I cannot believe I am actually posting in this thread.



Three- I believe a Dragon article mentions that the dragonborn were created for whatever reasons I don't remember which exactly. Point being, divine intentions were to create a HUMANOID race of dragons. Why do female dragonborn have breasts? The same reason female dwarves do, and female elves, and female halflings. The gods FELT like it. They obviously have some concept of what humanoids should be like, otherwise why would Moradin create dwarves remotely like humans or anything else? Obviously you can end up with exceptions to this, but the point is still there. They are humanoids.

you are so right. in evolutionary terms their bioobs don't make sense but we all have been forgetting one thing: in the d&d-verse, intelligent design true, evolution false!

Aedan_Uaine wrote:

Not evolution false, just "evolution as the absolute origin of everything." Evolution is a process that dictates what works survives, what doesn't declines. And I do believe that some of the races/monsters are described as coming into being by some evolution. For instance shifters were obviously not divinely originated as shifters, nor tieflings either (okay the tieflings are a entirely another case, but still). But the main humanoid races are most often described as divinely created.

i don't think evolution happens anywhere in d&d. if it does then there's probably an old coca-cola factory spewing caffeine into the environment that speeds up the evolutionary process. what i'm getting at is this, thought wotc hasn't stated how old their world is, for some reason the world seems to be only millenia old; thousands of years is not enough for evolution to do its work as we know it. i wouldn't say shifters or tieflings evolved per se but came about as a result of unconscious selective breeding. hope i make sense

Aedan_Uaine wrote:

Unconscious selective breeding is evolution. Plus I'm pretty sure the term "evolution" comes up in some of the monster lore entries. Also, evolution can often happen very fast. Speciation less so, but sometimes at a pretty fast rate. Now provided your not going to get stuff like reptiles to mammals/birds in that amount of time, but evolution doesn't suddenly go from one thing to another, it's constantly happening. I'm not saying that everything in D&D evolved from single celled organisms or even a small group of species. But it only makes sense for the process of evolution to continue to function. Otherwise you have two rather absurd situations. 1- stuff that's less suited to or even bad at surviving would have to survive just as well as the stuff that's well suited. Otherwise you get selection favoring traits and that's evolution. 2- Along the same lines, things that have never been suited to survive somewhere would somehow persist on their own and paradoxically survive.

But the main point we agree on, which is that initial origins for most things in the D&D world were by creation of some sort.

yeah i agree. as for single celled organisms, i highly doubt that such a thing ever existed in the d&d world. even if there are any i think they were made that way instead of actually evolving that way because all the current origin stories say the gods made the world and i don't see them making a fiery world with a bubbling primordial sea because there would be no point in creating such a world which would not be discernible from the pre-existing chaos of the primordials. so based on that, i believe every creature was created either directly or indirectly by the gods at first, however since that day millenia ago their environments began changing them but not to the point where entirely new species have arisen.

Aedan_Uaine wrote:

Ya, I wasn't suggesting anything in the D&D world started that way. Although there is such thing as instant speciation. It's most common in plants, but happens in some animals occasionally too. A genetic mishap, something going wrong with meiosis I think, but you end up with an offspring that is completely incapable of backcrossing with it's ancestral line. Has to do with polypoidy I believe. I don't feel like finding a reference but you should be able to look it up pretty easily.

Edit: these are fertile and can sometimes end up breeding with others from such sorts of occurrances. But like I said, more common with plants than anything else.

ok i never got beyond bio 101 so that's where my knowledge of genetics stops