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Message: <blockquote data-quote="empireofchaos" data-source="post: 6763705" data-attributes="member: 6800918">As it stands, established scientific disciplines across the board regard race as a social construct, not because social factors are merely "present", but because the evidence of their efficacy in the formation of race is much stronger. If you have evidence of how genetic mechanisms produce "race", or even interact with social factors to produce it through co-evolution, fine. Assumptions that biological factors "must" somehow influence race, and that there must be evidence to this effect somewhere smacks of unfalsifiability - no evidence can overturn the claim that it must be so. And if you really want to have a debate about the distinction between gender and sex like the one we're having about race and heritability, fine, but I don't think it's necessary to the question at hand. Oh, and incidentally, arguments regarding classes as groups influence by biology also continue to be made - upper classes do better on IQ tests after all, so, since a few publicists are saying this, maybe we should also assume that class IRL and in D&D is grounded in concrete, biological factors also??Even assuming that the statistical analysis in the study cited is faulty, the question is at best unsettled, and has no scientific consensus behind it. This means that people are referencing what they think the scientific evidence says, and applying that as a series of self-evident facts to fictional universes which they then assume work along similar principles. Since real world science provides no conclusive basis for assuming that races in fictional D&D worlds must be naturally given as opposed to class, perhaps there is something in the rule books that defines it so? No, such evidence is also assumed. Is there a section on genetics in the DMG that I missed? On evolutionary biology and demographics, explaining how elves and dwarves evolved separately over long enough periods to become separate species? On how nature as opposed to nurture influences the features listed in the PHB that are common across the racial group? If not, then the assumption that it works similarly to an unproven notion of how it works in our world is the definition of metagaming race. Your theological argument also rests on the assumption that the gods who created races and magic are kind of deist entities that think scientific laws into existence, and matter than conforms to these laws. There is nothing in the core rules, or game source material that I'm aware of, that stipulates that's how gods actually work. I can certainly point to evidence that gods in D&D are not absolutely transcendent. They can be killed, for one. Some mortals ascend to divinity. So they interact with other mortals, and the interaction changes them, which seems to me like evidence that the gods are social agents also, and participate in the social construction of magic, of races, and lots of other things. There are of course real world religions or philosophical movements that think along these lines also: God argues with Abraham about whether Sodom and Gomorrah should be destroyed, and is at one point convinced by the human's arguments. God also worries about Adam and Eve eating of the tree of Life and becoming like him. In Christianity and many other religions it's possible to escape natural, biological cycles (or even death!) through faith, divine grace, etc. Who is to say which theological doctrine of race is the correct one in the game? Did the gods create races fully formed and did they hardwire certain abilities into their heads? I don't know, but I'm not going to make the assumption that they did, because there is no evidence for it. All we know is that D&D worlds have lots of religions, and that the priests of these religions, including atheistic ones sometimes have access to divine spells, so perhaps they are all correct. To reiterate, I have no problem with accepting that in someone's world, races were in fact breathed into being by a god, and have a concrete reality. I have no problem playing a character in such a world, and no problem with accepting that a majority of DMs might define race in their settings precisely along these lines. But that's precisely because race is such a world is concrete because it is setting-specific, not imposed by metagame considerations. And since we're speaking about theology now, class being a calling (which is the PHB definition) can have precisely the same kind of concrete reality, because a calling of course issues from god.</blockquote>

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