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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7266821" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, not exactly.  There is this thing called 'genetic drift' were chunks of code leap between species.  Particularly in the case of plants and microorganisms 'descent' is no more easily traced than it is in a body of text as there can be multiple parents.You'll note I never argued otherwise.  I have frequently said that in many cases you can find evidence of multiple parentage and that multiple parents would be the hypothesis that best fits the textual evidence.  I've even described how you'd come to that conclusion.Look, I've already blocked on person over this sort of crap.   I HAVE NEVER SAID ANYTHING OF THE SORT.  I have never argued that if Tolkien came first, therefore it must be Tolkien.   There are many things I have a great deal of patience over, but one thing I have no patience with is pulling this sort of crap where you invent things quite opposed to my clear intention and blithely attribute them to me.   If you think I've said that if Tolkien came first, therefore it must be Tolkien, pull up the quotes that lead you to believe that.  If I have, I will certainly apologize for creating the misunderstanding.   Do not however slander me about something I've very obviously not said when anyone could pull sentences up showing that I said things exactly to the contrary.   The question of where Tolkien derived his ideas of spiders from is fundamentally different than where they came from in the Monster Manual.  Did Tolkien's spiders come from Burroughs?   We can make that hypothesis and apply the same standards of criticism to it that we applied to rule out Tolkien as the sole or even primary source of the spiders in the monster manual.   For example, did Tolkien's spiders frequently have more than eight legs?  Where they called out as being particularly vulnerable to other own venom?   If we could find things like that which are unique to or nearly unique to the EGB spiders, then we could establish that Tolkien was primarily influenced by Burroughs.  Similarly, if the Monster Manual spiders had these EGB features but lacked features found in Tolkien, then we could establish that both the MM spider and the Tolkien spider were primarily inspired by the EGB spider.Look, I'm a published author in peer reviewed journals in bioinformatics.  I assure you that when it comes to establishing taxon links between species that thousands or millions of years extinct are often there is no more "precision" in that than there is in textual criticism.  There is only a high probability that the link is not coincidental, and you can assign that probability on the basis of several assumptions.   We cannot "know" anything because there is a finite probability that even long sequences of genetic code could independently evolve through a series of mutations.   Nonetheless, you can get published doing this stuff, plenty of people's whole careers are spent doing this sort of stuff, and a reasonable person can be convinced from the available evidence that this is the most likely explanation (pending further evidence, which might overturn the theory).   Textual criticism is not that much different from that which for all your words, you basically concede when you write: "IMO, it's fairly obvious that Gygax borrowed from a wide range of sources, and the case that he borrowed from Tolkien is incredibly strong in some cases (Ranger, Halfling) and beyond weak in other cases (named magic swords)."Yes, you are quite right.  But you have those opinions and hold them to be obvious, and hold that those opinions can be held with different degrees of confidence precisely because you don't think that textual criticism that much different than science.   You wouldn't hold those opinions if you didn't think there were strong similarities with respect to the rigor with which you can pursue the two disciplines.  Or, if you don't actually think these things, then stop using words like 'obvious', 'strong', and 'weak' as if you really did believe that that these things were quantifiable and not just opinions of the same sort as "chocolate is my favorite ice cream".</blockquote>

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