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For those who aren't aware, the Intelligent Design theory suggests that, due to the way the universe works, it must have been created by God or a similar entity. Within the confines of the universe depicted in Paizo's books, we know that Golarion and everything in The Universe was indeed created by the gods, so that part holds true. However, it also appears that these "creational patterns" (for lack of a better term) seem to replicate very similar species and planets across the whole setting.
I'm talking specifically about how Golarion, Earth, and Androffa are always described to be quite similar to each other, with the three planets sharing humans as their most relevant species and (at least in Earth and Golarion) others species like dogs, cats, and other animals and plants. In other settings I wouldn't think about this because "its a fantasy setting with a medieval aesthethic so it doesn't matter if it isn't Earth because it will look like it", but Pathfinder delves heavily into Sci-Fi in certain aspects of its setting and Starfinder is a thing as well, so it kinda feels like there must be a reason why three planets that are far, far away from each other seem to share a ton of traits with each other.
I know the most likely answer is that these planets (Golarion and Androffa) look like they do because, initially, they were developed as fantasy medieval settings and most of the Sci-Fi stuff came latter (I believe James Jacobs said here on the forums that Androffa used to be his own setting back in the day, and I can't really say if Golarion was meant to be in the same universe as Androffa from the beggining of its development or it was something that was added latter as part of the PF1e Iron Gods AP), but I'm curious if this is something Paizo is building as a future plot point or just a happy coincidence. Btw, I also believe that this semi-confirms that elves, dwarves, orcs, and the like also should exist in Androffa too, assuming this Androffa is exactly the same as James Jacobs' original and not just a reference to it.
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In my mind, Golarion and Androffa were meant to be in the same universe from the start because that's how I justified giving so many deities and names and concepts from my homebrew to Paizo in those early scrambling days to get a brand new campaign setting off the ground without skipping a month between the last magazine and the first Pathfinder Adventure Path.
There IS some more info coming soon about Androffa in Pathfinder... but not as it stands today. The Androffa of today I would prefer to leave mysterious, because the more we detail it, the more we have to change names like "Sekamina" and "Mediogalti" and "Magnimar" and "Sandpoint" and "Kyonin" and "Karzoug" and so on because we "used" those for Golarion.
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Gonna split hairs here, I apologize...
Intelligent Design is an alternative explanation to the Evolution of Species via Natural Selection, and Evolution(which is what I'll shorten this to) is not dependent on abiogenesis(life emerging entirely from natural processes with no supernatural influence)
So, basically gods, or God, can create the universe, and even go as far as planting the first seeds of life, and Evolution is not impacted by this. Intelligent Design specifically would be stating that each species is create from whole cloth as it is now and there is no process of mutation, genetic drift, environmental pressures causing drastic enough changes for species to change. Hence the terminology "created kinds" within creationism and intelligent design
I'll be clear, proponents of Intelligent Design for the most part seemingly do not know that Evolution is not predictated on abiogenesis and so their argumentation against Evolution lumps these in together
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Given that hair splitting definition from my brother-in-tiny-but-still-formidable-dinosaur-arms, then Golarion is NOT a setting based on Intelligent Design. Evolution is a thing in the setting, but absolutely gods and mortals can create life in many different ways where the story wants.
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In Pathfinder, evolution is assumed to be the baseline for how creatures come to exist. However, there also exist specific cases where a creature has been created, augmented, mutated, engineered, etc. through magical or other means by alghollthus, deities, outsiders, mortals, etc. (or even circumstance).
It's not strictly one or the other.
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Gonna split hairs here, I apologize...
Intelligent Design is an alternative explanation to the Evolution of Species via Natural Selection, and Evolution(which is what I'll shorten this to) is not dependent on abiogenesis(life emerging entirely from natural processes with no supernatural influence)
So, basically gods, or God, can create the universe, and even go as far as planting the first seeds of life, and Evolution is not impacted by this. Intelligent Design specifically would be stating that each species is create from whole cloth as it is now and there is no process of mutation, genetic drift, environmental pressures causing drastic enough changes for species to change. Hence the terminology "created kinds" within creationism and intelligent design
I'll be clear, proponents of Intelligent Design for the most part seemingly do not know that Evolution is not predictated on abiogenesis and so their argumentation against Evolution lumps these in together
It's always been amusing that Darwin is assumed to be an atheist, which wasn't the case. He was observing processes occurring in the natural world without positing whether or not they were occurring absent the influence of a higher power. It wasn't his concern when he wrote The Origin of Species.
I don't think evolution is incompatible with gods and intelligent design. Even we humans take parts of the world and remake it on a genetic or material level to better survive or produce some trait we find desirable and we do it by studying how the thing we want to modify and manipulate works.
Given Golarion is a magic world. Plenty of people putting their mark modifying it whether with magic or technology and gods making fun stuff like undead and other strange creatures.
I would think Golarion is a combination of intelligent design and evolution where the gods and powerful people manipulate the world to their purposes while also learning how the world works by studying it.
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It really depends on the opinions of the reviewer of any particular product.
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It's funny that we have two dinosaur avatars discussing evolution, and hairless ones splitting hairs.
To split dino-hairs even finer, ID comes in different degrees depending on which proponent one talks with; each concedes a different amount of ground to evolutionary theory w/ "created whole cloth" being one of the rarer extremes (not that they're uncommon in the USA, just that they're typically overt Creationists, and Young Earth at that). Most of ID's spokespeople/authors prefer to avoid the larger argument (vs. a mountain of evidence) and point at the Cambrian Explosion or specific mechanisms (the eye being a favorite) and cry "Irreducible Complexity" (IC) to support that evolution had needed "an intelligence" (read: their god) behind it to function. Trouble is IC has zero evidence, relying more on gaps in knowledge. And all such examples (especially the eye) have had their development scientifically explained. But that knowledge is far from common and IDers can exploit that ignorance (and I imagine are busy searching for more esoteric mechanisms). Of course this has led them to address abiogenesis since there are still gaps in our naturalistic understanding (even though, as mentioned above, it's not a part of evolutionary theory). Except again, there's no evidence for ID or any facet of it like IC, just an unanswered question they want to exploit.
IMO it's also funny that ID was explicitly created to mask creationism to slip it into schools (and was rejected in court as religious/non-scientific). Yet ID's so flawed it doesn't fly in an actual created universe which instead has both creationism and evolution side by side (depending on one's narrative desires). Yet as much as I loathe ID for its underhanded subversion of the Constitution & scientific progress, there's ample evidence for it in the PF-verse, namely the exact same species developing on so many worlds (though teleportation/migration could also account for this). Lots of creatures have been created by "an intelligence" and many have been bred/shepherded by deities (or a certain Gold Dragon in a smaller example). So Intelligent Design exists in a sense, but an actual ID proponent might get jealous that such machinations to support the divine are unnecessary in the PF-verse.
So no in that evolution functions fine w/o intelligence guiding it in the PF-verse and also no in that the ID political agenda would be unnecessary in a universe with obvious intelligent creators, but yes, in that much such designing has occurred (at many degrees/power levels).
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Based on the explanation of our dear t-rex James Jacobs, what happens is that the evolution of life in the Golarion universe is no different from what happens here on Earth. If life is left free, it will simply adapt to the environment on its own. But just like here, where we can genetically alter life in various ways (whether through a laboratory or through crossbreeding), the gods and mortals in Golarion also do so via magic and alchemy (and genetics as well in the case of Starfinder), which makes it possible for some creatures to be a natural evolution of the environment, others created by an intelligent mind and even descendants of these that, even though artificially created, begin to evolve naturally on their own as well (after all, creating/altering a life does not block the evolution of its descendants).
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It's funny that we have two dinosaur avatars discussing evolution, and hairless ones splitting hairs.
I do plan to go back to school for either paleontology, evolutionary biology or simply to do paleoart, but suffice to say, I love animals alive and dead, and most especially dinosaurs(birds included) :)
But I like your additions which help bring clarity to what I wanted to communicate
Golarion clearly seems to have actual evolution at play, and magic just complicates the narrative but things clearly have all the mechanisms necessary, genes, genetic mutation, and environmental pressures
I don't know how the people in charge of lore wanna square the circle but I have always been a proponent of making humanoid fantasy races all human in the phylogenetic sense and this sharing a common ancestor. Orcs, Dwarves, Halfings, Gnomes, Elves, and probably even Goblins, are all clearly kinds of human. They're more like us than we are like chimps/bonobos. There can be wrinkles, gnomes are influenced by the first world, maybe a god liked humans so much they made their own kind, whatever, but to my mind, they're all taxonomically/phylogenetically human
I also just don't think our modern minds can conceive of animals existing without the process of evolution when we try and think about it hard enough. So it is bound to show up in fantasy these days
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Yet as much as I loathe ID for its underhanded subversion of the Constitution & scientific progress, there's ample evidence for it in the PF-verse, namely the exact same species developing on so many worlds (though teleportation/migration could also account for this).
I only have a VERY base level of understanding of biology, so I'm sure my contribution is practically nil compared to yours, but I think the concept of parallel (or even convergent) evolution is also interesting. Maybe similar/the same species appear on different worlds because it's just the ideal shape for that world. Maybe it's just inherent in any environment with a similar atmosphere to Earth/Golarion that humans will pop up eventually. Are we just a happy coincidence, or if we did this experiment a million times, will humanity come up every single time? (Insert "everything turns to crabs eventually"-meme.)
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Yet as much as I loathe ID for its underhanded subversion of the Constitution & scientific progress, there's ample evidence for it in the PF-verse, namely the exact same species developing on so many worlds (though teleportation/migration could also account for this).I only have a VERY base level of understanding of biology, so I'm sure my contribution is practically nil compared to yours, but I think the concept of parallel (or even convergent) evolution is also interesting. Maybe similar/the same species appear on different worlds because it's just the ideal shape for that world. Maybe it's just inherent in any environment with a similar atmosphere to Earth/Golarion that humans will pop up eventually. Are we just a happy coincidence, or if we did this experiment a million times, will humanity come up every single time? (Insert "everything turns to crabs eventually"-meme.)
I suspected convergent evolution (CE) might arise. :-)
Thing is that CE deals with form and function rather than genetics, so it's not like these crab-like creatures can interbreed (unlike PF-verse humans and many of the mammalian humanoid Ancestries). While species can keep tenuous links which allow them to continue breeding, it'd be essentially impossible to gain that ability (at least at the multi-cellular level...illogical things often occur at simpler levels).In my headcanon I like to imagine Golarion humanoids as having a magically infused evolution that allows them to perform superhuman feats and that they're only called "human" for our RPing benefit, not because of genetics. Except then Irrisen's connection to Earth throws a wrench in that (though arguably that's not Earth since it has magic).
OR...
Maybe PF-verse evolution does work like you suggest right down to the genetic level, guided by an invisible pressure/force so that impossible odds are actually near certain. L. Ron Hubbard proposed a nearly-100% rate of human development for his Mission Earth series (as he wanted aliens to fit right in, though maybe it served a pro-human Scientology mindset too). While very handy for one's narrative simplicity and character relatability, I think that raises more mystery than it supplies fantasy-narrative usefulness. But if one wanted forces beyond the deities that's one way to go, like genetic fate/karma. This could account for the anthropomorphic nature of PF-verse deities, though it seems simpler to say we fit their mold than that there's an uber-mold from even higher up. Of course that would overwrite at least our evolution and JJ himself said there's evolution so how did all these duplicate species appear so distant from each other (which is one of the primary drivers of speciation, so we can't have split too long ago)?
Maybe better left loose so as to allow the most narrative possibility/flexibility for tables since it's unlikely to be necessary to establish a rigorous answer for any AP.
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Yet as much as I loathe ID for its underhanded subversion of the Constitution & scientific progress, there's ample evidence for it in the PF-verse, namely the exact same species developing on so many worlds (though teleportation/migration could also account for this).I only have a VERY base level of understanding of biology, so I'm sure my contribution is practically nil compared to yours, but I think the concept of parallel (or even convergent) evolution is also interesting. Maybe similar/the same species appear on different worlds because it's just the ideal shape for that world. Maybe it's just inherent in any environment with a similar atmosphere to Earth/Golarion that humans will pop up eventually. Are we just a happy coincidence, or if we did this experiment a million times, will humanity come up every single time? (Insert "everything turns to crabs eventually"-meme.)I suspected convergent evolution (CE) might arise. :-)
Thing is that CE deals with form and function rather than genetics, so it's not like these crab-like creatures can interbreed (unlike PF-verse humans and many of the mammalian humanoid Ancestries). While species can keep tenuous links which allow them to continue breeding, it'd be essentially impossible to gain that ability (at least at the multi-cellular level...illogical things often occur at simpler levels).
Convergent evolution gets... complicated with the the existence of alghollthus manipulating lifeforms at the genetic level on multiple worlds, sharing the racial memories before their diaspora, and communicating with each other via the omnipaths. Not to mention the deities working off of their "initial draft" of creation in the First World.
I mean... we got a literal beta-branch of the material plane in the First World
The deities may have literally just have placed versions of "life starter kits" on whatever worlds they were interested in and/or manipulated things over the course of eons to result in their respective "favorites" appearing.
As with many things regarding a fictional setting, getting too far into the weeds on "how things work" and/or trying too hard to equate the setting to real life (or vice versa) tends to be counterproductive.
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Just a note, dino hairs would be either feathers or proto feathers.
Also I love how people are so against genetic modification in products, when humans have been messing with the genes of plant life for thousands of years.
Considering Golarian's age, could most intelligent creatures be traced back to a distantly related creature or for some an original form?
Is intelligence in certain creatures evolution, magical mutation, divine creation or some other influence? Sounds like a fantastic study project for some student at one of the academies.
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Wow. Came back after a few busy days and I see a ton of people in a non-gameplay focused post about the lore. Nice.
Just for the record, because I think people are taking the title of the post a little to literally (not like I blame them), my real question here is "how can humans exist in three planets that are so far away from each other and be, effectively, biologically the same?" This also extends to other species that also exist in at least two of these three planets like most animals and plants, and possibly elves, orcs, dwarves, etc. in the case of Golarion and Androffa.
Also, since James is here and mentioned names, do you guys at Paizo follow a particular naming scheme for characters, places, and the like? I ask this because I always felt like Paizo names had an unique "texture" to them making them sound like something in-between fantasy and sci-fi naming schemes.
I wouldn't be surprised if its just "it sounds cool so let's use that one" too though.
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Also, since James is here and mentioned names, do you guys at Paizo follow a particular naming scheme for characters, places, and the like? I ask this because I always felt like Paizo names had an unique "texture" to them making them sound like something in-between fantasy and sci-fi naming schemes.
I wouldn't be surprised if its just "it sounds cool so let's use that one" too though.
Everyone has their own methods for generating names; after working here for a few decades, I've developed a weird skill where I can recognize with relatively good accuracy which employee or long-term freelancer is the one who likely named something, as a result. We have some guidelines for how to name core ancestry characters (which we try to give examples of in their ancestry entries), but the overall advice we give our writers and try to abide by ourselves is to avoid Easter Eggs and unintentional accidental meanings. Google searches are your friend here, so you don't accidently name something after a famous thing (fictional or otherwise) that will not only color the perception of what you're naming, but could open Paizo up to legal worries in a worst case scenario (which is one of the reasons, for example, we won't name a character something like Batman Gandalf). It's also a good idea to say the name out loud, and even better, show a friend the name as a word and ask them to say it out loud. That's a good way to tell if the way you're spelling the name makes it work, and if you have a friend who's particularly irreverent that's even better because they'll find the accidental embarrassing names quickly.
It's also worth obeying the structural rules for the language you're writing in (or the culture whose linguistic and naming traditions you're taking inspiration from), because that's how words work. When you're creating a nonsense word to be a new name, the Keyboard Mash method is a fine starting point, but you should then refine that name so that it looks like how it would be actually written and can be said by a human mouth. Even if it's your goal to present that sort of thing, the written version should be something that humans can say out loud.
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There's no canon answer to your question re: multiple planets, so any of the answers above work if you want them to, even simultaneously to explain the different lore/time frames and interbreeding. Ultimately I find it difficult to rectify "evolution of humans on real Earth" with any of it. But PF-verse Earth isn't real Earth anyway so IMO the best (until a narrative requires otherwise) would be First World templates seeded throughout the PF-verse w/o too much deviation/speciation for those from separation, but unlimited extra species that arise via evolution, magic, planar energies, & the hordes of powers prone to tampering.
Much of Golarion comes from staff campaign worlds (especially JJ's), so there's no one source or methodology. A contributor friend of mine was free to create his own names for his scenarios, then got caught trying to sneak in German wordplay (not quite puns, but close). So there is oversight, yet there have also been accidents like duplication or names so similar they must be related (but aren't). I recall a situation where Orc names seemed racist to speakers of one Earth language because their names shared similarities, unintentionally I must add.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the "sounds cool" method, now coupled with a Paizo database & Google to double check.
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As someone else mentioned, the answer to how can you have multiple humans on different planets is convergent evolution. It's just a practical and effective biological design for the place its in. If the planets are the same, then it's likely the same creatures will evolve there.
Great what if ideas can come from this, like what would have evolved intelligence and became the dominant species on the planet had each of the mass extinctions not happened? What dinosaur would become space fairing? What terror bird?
There's also the stargate theme of one species just bringing others with them and planting them on different planets.
On a more fundamental level it is, sadly, just how most fiction is written to represent the author and reader.
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One other consideration for the "humans on different planets (and even in different galaxies)" issue: It's really hard to create entirely new fictional species and societies (to include history and cultural subgroups) in a consistent and believable manner. And then gamers would have to actually study the material to create characters that don't violate the setting expectations; you can even see this in RPGs that are based on real world historical areas.
That's the primary reason that humans are so often the "baseline" for most RPGs. Even if it doesn't "make sense" for settings not on Earth.
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That's not convergent evolution. Not saying this faux cousin isn't a viable solution, just that I'd recommend a new sparkly name rather than the actual term for a lesser phenomenon. Assuming one doesn't want to go the 60s sci-fi/superhero route of mangling science out of laziness, i.e. Radiation=magical plot device. Hmm. Or modern too I suppose by those tagging "quantum", "aura", or some esoteric biological term on unfounded beliefs.
So one might call it a Primary Evolution Track for the most common forms w/ other tiers based on commonality. Since so many planar creatures have a similar form (and often can mate with humanoids) one could add some divine lingo if preferred, like Exalted Evolution (if that class hadn't existed!), maybe Divine Image Evolution (where evolution "naturally" leads towards these duplicates of planar creatures). Mirrored Evolutionary Pressure causes DNA-Level Hyperevolution (where mirrored and hyper mean little to nothing, but have that zing).
I also find it a stretch to operate as if humanoids are best-case scenarios re: evolutionary outcomes, and some less common Ancestries might argue here. Obviously it's dragons, just ask a Kobold. :-)
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One other consideration for the "humans on different planets (and even in different galaxies)" issue: It's really hard to create entirely new fictional species and societies (to include history and cultural subgroups) in a consistent and believable manner. And then gamers would have to actually study the material to create characters that don't violate the setting expectations; you can even see this in RPGs that are based on real world historical areas.
That's the primary reason that humans are so often the "baseline" for most RPGs. Even if it doesn't "make sense" for settings not on Earth.
Yeah, that's the same reason so many (arguably TOO many) stories start with an Earthling the audience can identify with and who can use Earth slang/references/analogies. Then when thrust into a bizarre situation the narrator has touchstones for audience comprehension, a human mind which can comment on behalf of them.
(And then we shoehorn a planet of sapient beings into convenient boxes which lack the diversity of even one of our cultures much less the thousands Earth has. That used to be common with geography and more too.)| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Batman Gandalf. That is an alternate version of James Bond Gandalf otherwise known as Elminster.
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I've always run with the assumption either:
The gods have been seeding worlds with people.
The gods actively make changes to people on their worlds to make them compatible with one another.
Whatever magical force exists in the universe produces evolution pressure to create similar lifeforms
Something to that effect anyways. Most people handwave away the logic of multiple species, or don't even think about it at all. If you do think about it, you start realizing how silly it is to try to explain convergent evolution. We are 99.9% similar to chimps, but we are incompatible with them and look vastly different (compared to elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes, etc). The odds of different worlds somehow independently producing lifeforms even more similar through total random chance is basically zero.
I like to think of the earth as a sort of magically conceptual eye of the storm for the universe. A calm spot that generates a huge number of concepts that spreads and takes root in other worlds through the medium of magic. It would explain the ubiquity of humanoids, while still allowing for variation.
It's similar to the problem Star Trek has asked of itself many times: "Why are there so many humanoids in the galaxy? Statistics says this should be impossible"
I think in the end it's meant to be vague so you as the DM can either ignore it completely or make up whatever reason you want to for your table.
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It's similar to the problem Star Trek has asked of itself many times: "Why are there so many humanoids in the galaxy? Statistics says this should be impossible"
Star Trek answered this question IIRC which is there is literally an ancient Progenitor race that seeded humans, Vulcans, Klingons, and many/most of the other humanoid races. The progenitors were the only sapient humanoid species during their existence.
So it is literally a case of intelligent design, but only in so far as seeding life and not actually guiding what the end result would look like beyond some basic building blocks.
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The Universe is very much a case of ID, especially the cycle of life and death. But the whole of reality is another matter completely. It was not created the way it is because of the gods designing it this way.
Now, maybe there is something beyond the gods that purposefully created the whole cycle of the lives and deaths of realities for their own inscrutable purpose.
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The Universe is very much a case of ID, especially the cycle of life and death. But the whole of reality is another matter completely. It was not created the way it is because of the gods designing it this way.
Now, maybe there is something beyond the gods that purposefully created the whole cycle of the lives and deaths of realities for their own inscrutable purpose.
I assume you mean with respect to Golarion.
And I agree with you, there is a high plausibility of some intelligent design behind the whole thing. My evidence to that end is the "key stone" that Pharasma used to build in this incarnation of the multiverse.
Based on the Windsong Testament (I think) we know this isn't the first multiverse to exist, as Pharasma was the survivor of the previous one. And she used the key from the previous universe, to start this one. The exact extent to which she controlled it, and the extent to which the key generated things, or where the key came from aren't really known or understood. But something created it, and Pharasma guided it (maybe?).
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I recommend reading why the giraffe is used as an example of evolution over intelligent design. It is a hoot.
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I recommend reading why the giraffe is used as an example of evolution over intelligent design. It is a hoot.
Five entire meters of vagus nerve is one heck of an argument against anyone having designed that on purpose, yeah. (I believe there's an anatomical dissection available where they manage to extract the entire nerve intact, which is both very impressive and makes it sharply obvious how ridiculous this is)