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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8369768" data-attributes="member: 6801228">You know, something about this argument has always bugged me, and finally I have the context for why. I recently watched a comedy news show (I think it was "More News") on "Critical Race Theory". I don't want to dive into politics, but this is important to my conception here. There is a lot of panic out there, things like "Critical Race Theory is being taught to kindergartners." Well, this news show pointed out that "Critical Race Theory" has been around for a few decades, and that it was a term for a specific view in legal philosophy, taught in schools like Harvard. To truly drive home his point about how it was not being taught to Kindergartners he played a clip of a guy who actually teaches this stuff explaining what it is on a news show. I got about... 10% of it. It is dense and complicated stuff that you truly and honestly need a deep understanding of the subject to even follow. Why bring this up? Because it demonstrates that taking a term out of its context, and just applying to other contexts can be highly misleading. And, it was with that thought that I did something I've never done in these discussions. I googled "What is biological Essentialism" This is the answer I got.Biological essentialism depicts a process in which biological influences precede cultural influences and set predetermined limits to the effects of culture.This comes from a paper that seems to have been written about sociology, but if this is the understanding of it... then that does sort of change your questions. But, I decided to go ahead and double check by googling a second question "Do Biologists use the term Biological essentialism" And, in simple terms, the answer I got was a paper talking about the place of "essentialism" in the history of biology and the relation it has with evolutionary theory. The idea coming in that "essentialism" was seen as an idea of unchanging essences.So, with this new understanding I started looking back at some of these questions... and aren't they a bit silly in this context? "Of course wings set predetermined limits to the effect of culture on a person"? None of these abilities fall into this category. Now, to be fair, do "grace" or "strength" really fall into them either? Not necessarily. But, you can't have these without having intelligence or wisdom... and that does start getting into that territory. But we don't really talk about species and biology in this manner. We don't talk about "Biological Essentialism" in terms of birds, or insects, or anything else. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Also, since we are here, let's tackle a bit on the second argument that we see all the time. "Isn't species A stronger than Species B"? It sounds reasonable at first, but there is a problem. See, the game just isn't set up to show the level of difference people are talking about in those instances. For example, Elephants can lift up to 7 tons, 14,000 lbs. Translating that into DnD? Huge Creature means str*4, lift is *30, reverse by dividing... A strength score of 116. So, on average, an elephant "species" would need a +100 to strength to capture that difference from a human. A +2? A difference of 30 lbs? That is nothing. Yes, an elephant is obviously stronger than a dog. But the difference between PCs never reaches these levels in "real-world logic". Mechanically, in the game where +2 is supposed to make a difference to accuracy and damage? It makes a difference. World-building wise though? This is nothing that would actually differentiate. It is a tiny tiny difference.</blockquote>

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