Evolution in a World of Fantasy

[Alcamtar]

You don't necessarily need the millions-of-years process to get interesting results. If you have domesticated pigs that escape the farm, about three generations of offspring later you're dealing with big, dangerous, feral swine. Some creatures just adapt faster. I figure that's why there are so many kinds of goblins. In a few years, their offspring are completely optimized to their surroundings. If first level adventurers didn't come along and wipe them out every so often, they'd overrun a kingdom completely.

That is a very interesting idea. It would be fun to have a area where two generations ago there was a goblin war. Adventurers are sent to check out the "goblins" and find they have evolved into bugbears or thouls or kobolds due to some environmental change.

Naturally such mutation assumes humans and demihumans will rapidly evolve as well. Maybe humans evolve into cavemen, orcs, ogres, half elves, morlocks, and other things. I think there needs to be some stabilizing influence. Maybe that's what sets humans and demihumans apart - they breed true for thousands of years at a stretch. Or maybe it is human religion that exerts a stabilizing force: babies conceived and born within the borders of a parish (and blessed by the priests) will breed true, but families in the wilderness have strange children and after a few generations are no longer human.

If magic is a real environmental force, creatures would adapt to magic just like anything else. If plants and butterflies can evolve abilities that rely on quantum effects, creatures will absolutely evolve magical properties, as well as magical defenses.

 

[Umbran]

You don't necessarily need the millions-of-years process to get interesting results. If you have domesticated pigs that escape the farm, about three generations of offspring later you're dealing with big, dangerous, feral swine.

You realize that domesticated swine are not exactly small or nice to begin with, right?

What you speak of has nothing to do with their genetics. That's learning and developmental differences from having to actually work for a living, so to speak. Take a piglet from that feral swine (if it doesn't kill you in the attempt to take it's young, I mean), and raise it in a farm environment, it will be just like any other pig on the farm.

 

[Greatwyrm]

I didn't say they were nice or that it was a genetic shift. I said it doesn't take very long to get interesting, noticeable changes. The idea of nuisance creatures rapidly adapting to their surroundings, by learning or otherwise, seemed fun and appropriate for a game. But if charting millions of years of branching evolutionary trees of fantasy creatures that will probably never appear in a game at the table sounds like fun, please don't let me stand in the way.

 

[Celebrim]

I didn't say they were nice or that it was a genetic shift. I said it doesn't take very long to get interesting, noticeable changes.

I suppose not, but changes in the expressed phenotype aren't necessarily strictly speaking evolutionary changes. That sort of thing can occur through real world polymorphism were the same population interbreeding exhibits several distinctive characteristics that allow it to engage in a wider variety of behavior (see for example Darwin's Finches). Polymorphic European wolves are believed to be the root stock of the domestic dog, which in its modern form exhibits all sorts of different phenotypes from what is essential one genetic breeding pool.

Simplifying, imagine a species where it has for each different physical trait - length of coat, length of leg, length of snout, etc. - a set of 16 or so genetic switches that can be set to 0-1. In an average dog about half of these will be toggled to one or the other producing average expressed traits. Any two dogs are unlikely to produce offspring with anything but average traits. But under population pressure (or selective breeding) the average successful breeder will tend to have more of one or the other depending what aids the individuals fitness. The result will be a population with a lower than average number of '0's or '1's in the control region while still being a member of its same species. In a natural setting, the same population could potentially even reverse the process when conditions changed as long as a reasonable amount of genetic diversity remained in the group. This isn't evolution in the sense we normally mean it of the descent of species - this is a sort of complex evolved ability to adapt. This and several other interesting features of the genetic code are evolved to allow genetic stability and diversification without the need to rely on the slow, random, and usually harmful process of mutation. In fact, there are even some features of the genetic code that are designed to encourage mutation in those same phentotype control regions while protecting regions that are responsible for things you don't want to evolve because changes here would almost certainly be fatal - like say basic metabolic processes - in a sort of pseudo-Lamarkianism.

 

[Umbran]

I suppose not, but changes in the expressed phenotype aren't necessarily strictly speaking evolutionary changes. That sort of thing can occur through real world polymorphism were the same population interbreeding exhibits several distinctive characteristics that allow it to engage in a wider variety of behavior (see for example Darwin's Finches).

Heck, that sort of thing can come from sheer differences in diet and exercise patterns. Compare the phenotypic differences between a human who exercises daily and eats a healthy diet, and one who sits on a sofa eating Cheetos and drinking Moutnain Dew all day. Think if the behavior differences are from birth, through your entire development, and into adulthood. You'll have two markedly different individuals. Similarly - for the same genetic content in humans, you can end up with individuals of markedly different heights, depending on the protein content of their diet in their formative years. This isn't genetic polymorphism (which still needs some selective pressure to display itself clearly), it is the same genes under different conditions.

Remember, in some species, whether an individual turns out male ore female can be based on the temperature the eggs were kept at during development. Life... can be kinda freaky