Evolution in World Design

Before one can begin with how to actually create life in world design, one first must cover how life is actually created. It's not a single-step process, and whatever creator there may or may not be, uses the same process as the rest of us. It's a slow, methodical approach which takes a great deal of time.

While it's perhaps possible for a deity to create a world from nothing instantaneously, this doesn't lend itself to the purpose behind why we're covering world design in the first place: if we could just snap our fingers and make everything magically appear out of thin air, we wouldn't need to study the mechanics behind it. As this isn't the case, instead we must understand the fundamental, underlying principles behind how life originates, how it grows and adapts over time, and how it fulfills a process of not only self-replication, but also how life inevitably fills any niche and resource available.

When I cover this material in my class, I cover the scientific terminology behind what a theory is, and take a class out to ensure that the students understand the mechanics behind how evolution works. Since this essay is much more streamlined, we'll be skipping that part this time in favour of focusing upon how evolution specifically benefits a world designer and how to employ it as a framework with which to build up a world in layers as a natural consequence of the previous levels.

The first thing that must be understood is that evolution is not about "survival of the fittest" as many mistakenly believe, nor is it about guaranteed improvement over time. The key to evolution is vastly more simplistic, and economical than this idea: procreation.

The key here is that the quality of the species is irrelevant, only the end quantity. If a species propagates in large numbers, even if only a small number survive, if more survive in total than a species which propagates in small numbers with a higher percentage survival rate, then the former will tend to be more successful overall.

To this end, evolution is truly not about being "better", with the singular exception of being better at breeding, which is a combination of surviving long enough to breed, attracting a mate, and being able to produce enough offspring from which the next generation can be bred from.

In the selfish gene model, as postulated by Dawkins, the organism serves primarily as a device of transmission for the gene, not the other way around. In this mindset, things like long term survival, such as having to eat, gaining defensive advantages, adaptations to the environment and so on, are important because they allow for the proliferation of the genes.

Within each generation and individual, there is a degree of inaccuracy in the copying over of genes. This ensures that the individuals of the next generation have some differences from the previous. In the vast majority of these cases, these genes will be harmful or negligible in value, either having no effect upon breeding or significantly reducing the chances of breeding. However, there is also the rare case where a beneficial effect emerges, such as a protein variant that allows for the digestion of a different type of more abundant food source. In this case, the individual with this change is vastly more likely to survive, grow strong, and therefore breed. This isn't a guaranteed situation, but it does trend towards such on average over a long period of time.

Now, the key to why evolution is so important is that it naturally brings us to exactly what we see today: a wide range of life with each bit of life specialized to handle different tasks. To reach this point, however, there are two key factors which must exist:

1: Isolation 2: A niche need unexploited or minimally exploited

To start with, let's begin with isolation. If a group can interbreed with itself, then it will invariably transfer genetic material back and forth among itself. While this may cause the entire species to change over time, for the most part it negates benefits as what may be useful in one area may be detrimental in another.

For an example of this, we look to the Galapagos islands, wherein one species of bird may gain a long, narrow beak for reaching down long, narrow flowers. Another bird may gain a short, stout beak with a stronger jaw strength for cracking the shells of seeds. Were the two species to have intermingled breeding with one another, then these traits would either cancel each other out, leaving a species ineffective at both, or would trend towards specializing in one option or the other.

By isolating groups, that group is free to express certain preferences genetically over time, and as such, a world designer must take into account that there must be some method of separation of species.

If we were to take land-based creatures, they would need to be separated by physical barriers, such as mountains, rivers, oceans, or other similar barriers to mobility. For sea-based creatures, we can use things such as depth or water temperature in a similar manner; creatures upon the abyssal shelf are unlikely to interbreed with those in the deepest trenches, nor those in freshwater or at surface depths.

For the second point, so long as a resource is available, the species which first gains the ability to exploit that resource will benefit from it. This can be clearly seen in how the food cycle operates.

At the start of the food cycle we have the initial exploitation of an energy source: in most cases, this involves the absorption of light and heat from the sun as it's an external source of both forms of energy. Green plants enact photosynthesis to utilize these resources, and are able to survive because of such.

Next on the list, we invariably find that there is a new resource available: green plants which have just accrued a storage of energy in the form of cellulose, among several other types of storage medium. Cellulose can be created even at a bacterial level, so these bacteria were quickly able to make use of the sun's energy, and then to gradually grow more effective at doing so over time, turning into the plants we see today. However, as stated, this means we now have the second tiered source of energy, and with such will come the rise of herbivores.

The very nature of life ensures that any random adaptation which happens to be beneficial towards exploiting a resource will be rewarded for doing so. As such, we see plants exist, then herbivores which eat the plants. Since we now have herbivores which eat the plants, inevitably a carnivore will eventually arise which is able to feed upon the herbivores as they are now a plentiful source of food.

This cycle continues, over and over, with each new development causing a new species to emerge with which to make use of the previous species. Additionally, however, evolutionary adaptations ensure that each of these individual species grow over time.

The plant which gains a toxicity to it will be more likely to survive being eaten by the herbivore. The herbivore, in kind, will be more likely to survive by being resistant to the toxic plantlife it feeds upon, and therefore the individuals which are randomly born with a slight resistance will survive to breed more regularly.

Over time, this leads to an arms race of sorts: one species gains stronger and stronger defenses, while another gains stronger and stronger offensive capabilities with which to exploit the favoured resource. After many generations upon both sides, this develops unique adaptations for survival, and will splinter off into different species which handle the situations they face in different ways.

One group of plants may gain thorns, another may become poisonous, and a third may develop strong, resistant bark. Even though these all began as a single species of plant life, each one gains their own unique method of survival based on the random roll of the genetic dice. Which is the most effective is irrelevant in this case: only which benefit was the first one to come across which was more beneficial than what was previously employed.

The key to understand, here, is that each time one species gains a new trait, the species which feed upon the original species must also gain a trait to continue feeding upon such. The plant gains thorns, and the herbivore gains a stronger lining to the mouth and digestive tract. That same herbivore already has the adaptation of stronger skin, so it's easier for it to have this trait carry over to the outer skin as well, developing a tough armoured hide. The carnivore is forced to develop a method with which to damage the hide, such as sharpened claws or longer, stronger teeth.

Of course, the food chain doesn't end there; a larger predator may feed upon a smaller predator, and so the food chain extends out further with each predator gaining a greater strength to feed upon earlier species.

This does, however, ensure that there is an end to the food chain.

All of the energy of the entirety of the food chain is derived from the initial source of energy. In this case, the sun, and subsequently the plants which feed upon the solar energy provided. With each subsequent link in the food chain, some of that energy is lost through means of digestion or other means of exploitation of the previous links. This guarantees that there is eventually a point at which it simply requires more energy to exploit the energy reserves of the previous link. Apex predators will simply become so powerful that there's no realistic way for any "greater" species to feed upon these apex predators without expending more energy to catch, kill and eat them than can be gained reliably from the food source. As such, the food chain must end, no matter what.

At the end of the food chain, a new link is forged by necessity: once an apex predator dies, there is now a new food source which takes less effort to attain than by catching and killing, and so the carrion feeder is born, as is the parasite, the virus and the bacteria.

In a supernatural world, as one may find within fiction, other aspects can also exist, such as creatures having spiritual energy, or magical properties. If a given world has a high background mana level, or crystallized mana is ingested, then the food chain would invariably find a way to exploit this as a resource as happened with the sun. This means there may also develop creatures which specifically hunt the spirits or souls of creatures which have deceased, feeding upon this residual spiritual energy.

Just adding magic to a world and saying "good enough" is exactly false: it's not good enough at all. By understanding the mechanics behind the food chain and evolution, we discover that if magic exists in the world, it will exist in nature as well. Creatures will inevitably find ways to exploit such a resource. Plants such as vines will naturally grow into elaborate ritual circles if it prevents enemies from harming them, simply out of sheer blind luck over time. Creatures will gain magic-based abilities such as a dragon's breath, and in turn, prey will gain magic-based defenses to counteract such.

Any small change to a world will trigger a cascade of effects, and as such, the world designer needs to be able to think many steps ahead in logical sequence from one to the next, to the next.

This also means that any world which is "just like ours, but has magic!" is essentially an abortion of this sequence and fails to realize the potential it contains within it. Any time a designer adds a new feature to a world, such as magic, or an additional element with beneficial properties such as a rock formation which negates gravity, there's a great deal of interesting effects which can be drawn from such. To not explore these options fully is to defeat the purpose of adding them into the world in the first place, and to ignore an enormous resource with which game mechanics or wondrous imaginary creatures and events could have been derived.

Inspiration comes from everywhere, but it especially comes from self-referral; as a world designer adds even a single trait to their world, that world can then refer to that trait and generate multiple offshoots of unique design from that point. A capable world designer will meticulously and ruthlessly exploit this potential for inspiration, ensuring their world has a logical sequence of interesting events by designing it from the base level and seeing where it leads, rather than starting at the end and tacking on effect.

In this vein, the MYTH series, while highly entertaining, is not particularly well designed for the base world that the series starts out upon as it makes the error of just being a generic earthlike world with no real changes other than having magic. In later installments, however, worlds such as the Bazaar at Deva are vastly more well designed with careful consideration employed into how they came to be the way they are, and these other worlds manage to capture a vastly more vibrant and lifelike world because of such.

Returning back to the line of evolutionary reasoning, there are several other things which soon come to light, with one of the most predominant of these being that evolution favours the easiest solution.

If a problem exists, or a resource can be exploited, then the smallest, easiest change is the preferred method. It's not a conscious decision, but rather the chances are that getting a single gene to be randomly useful is vastly more likely than trying to have a dozen such genes all line up at the same time in a row.

Once an initial benefit is enacted, however, amplification of that trait is much easier to incite, as making a thorn sharper or longer or appear in more locations is much easier than making a thorn in the first place. As such, this can lead to very complex features over many generations, but the most simplistic initial solution tends to be the favoured option in almost all cases.

This means that a light-sensitive patch of skin which can tell which direction the sun is could be helpful for situations such as navigation, and would be easy to produce. Over time, the quality of the light-sensitivity may increase, small adaptations here and there may improve the resolution, the directional sensing, the wavelengths able to be differentiated between and so on. As such, an eye can be produced, despite being complex, because the basic concept of a light-sensitive cell is simple, and found even in simplistic plants, all the way down to some forms of bacteria.

The eye does not need to be created from scratch, only a tiny bit at a time, and so long as the initial, basic form had at least some small benefit, it may be maintained. A wing, for example, would not have originally been capable of flight, but may have been used for anything from warmth, to helping while running, to stability when attacking prey.

In the case of gender and sex, this ensures that it's very unlikely that more than two distinct forms will present themselves. While there's several variations on this theme on Earth itself, such as avians using the ZW chromosomes, and mammals using an XY chromosome set. We have some species gaining a cloaca, others gaining a penis and vagina, and in more bizarre situations, we even see examples like the spotted hyena where the female develops a pseudopenis.

The point behind this is that the selfish gene model produces such an occurrence as an inevitability: genes must mutate over time to create new advantages, and better advantages must mix and match for survival. Genetic diversity is required to avoid inherent instability and degradation, such as arises with inbreeding or cloning a clone repeatedly. As such, either the genetic template must be simplistic enough for ease of copying, such as a single celled organism, or capable of counteracting its own inherent instability.

This is achieved primarily by having two genetic templates merge together, such as in the form of sexual reproduction. This also means, however, that the easiest and simplest form is typically the most efficient. Having two sexes is more than enough to counteract the problem, and adding in a third would decrease the chances of breeding by more than the benefits of having a third sex would benefit such. As such, unless an individual species becomes advanced enough to genetically manipulate themselves, it's unlikely that any species would gain more than two sexes, and also unlikely that a genetically advanced species would have less than two sexes.

As stated, there is a downside to having multiple sexes: now two members of the species must exist to breed, and must be near each other to do so, instead of being able to breed by themselves. This is a consistent feature in genetics in that each and every advantage also comes with an associated cost.

For the previous example of the eye, the fact of the matter is that creating an eye costs energy and resources which are perpetually in limited supply. By creating an eye, the benefits for having that eye must invariably outweigh not having the eye, or at least provide some substantial enough benefit as to be worth the investment for it to be maintained long term in the genetics of the species, or at the absolute least, provide so little of a cost as to be negligible.

As one might expect, were a species to enter into an environment where an eye would have no beneficial use, such as deep underground in a cave system with literally zero sunlight, any member born with a genetic defect wherein the eye only partially forms, or fails to form at all, would be at a significant advantage over other members of the same species, wherein the resources required to create the eye aren't consumed, leading to lower need to feed, which in turn increases the likelihood of survival. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what we see in reality.

So, too, must fiction follow reality in this manner - any time a trait is generated upon a creature, it must maintain a net positive effect for the creature's survival, and refinement to further effectiveness will only occur if it somehow lends aid to genetic selection.

Sometimes, even penalties can occur in this case, such as the peacock having unwieldy, difficult to walk with plumage which draws considerable attention and consumes enormous resources to create in the first place. As a byproduct of such, the peahen is able to determine a suitable mate due to the fact that a peacock which is well-fed will have brighter plumage, and will be clearly more capable of survival if it handicaps itself and paints a large bullseye upon itself only to survive despite such. This ensures that only the strongest genes are passed on to the next generation, even if some of those genes also include a handicap.

The point here is that a world designer must take these matters into consideration when developing a new species. Just randomly slapping on things that seem cool really doesn't make a very interesting creature, and usually feels rather awkward. By developing a creature from the ground up, and developing multiple species at the same time which affect one another, such as a carnivore gaining better offensive abilities to attack a herbivore, as well as greater defenses to defend against a larger, stronger carnivore, we see a self-selection process wherein creatures make logical sense within the framework on their environment as a whole, instead of randomly placed creatures with little to no correlation nor interaction with one another.

While there are many other points that could be covered in relation to such, the key points to understand are simply that life does not exist within a vacuum, that life will invariably find a way to exploit resources which are readily available, and life will not waste resources if the net gain is a negative over time. By following logical progression, an entire ecosystem of an alien world can be created with vastly less time and effort than may be suspected, and even fairly mundane, earthlike worlds can have new species added with vastly more speed and efficiency than if the designer were to attempt to create each species individually one at a time. As a side benefit, by working with multiple species and resources at a time, the entirety will feel more realistic and natural instead of forced, which greatly increases the immersion value and the audience's attachment to the new world which has been created.