Why are there so few mages?
David Friedman
interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
than if he did not have it.
So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
Several possibilities occurred to me:
1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
biological side effect such as lower fertility.
2. Young mages often kill themselves in the process of learning to use
their talent; in my world that is true at least of fire mages.
3. The use of magery has negative biological side effects--perhaps it is
so exhausting that mages are more prone to diseases and accidents than
other people.
4. The use of magery has negative behavioral side effects--negative, of
course, from the standpoint of reproductive success. Perhaps it is so
absorbing that mages are unlikely to marry and raise children. Perhaps
the society is one in which most women would prefer to bear fewer
children than they do; female mages can and do use their talent to keep
themselves from getting pregnant.
5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic explanation--something
entirely different might be going on. Suppose there are beings--not
necessarily conscious--which I will call mageons. There are a fixed
number of them, they are immortal, and they attach themselves to humans
at birth; a human with a mageon has magical talent. Mageons tend to
attract each other, so the child of a mage or a mage couple is more
likely to have a mageon nearby when he is born, giving the illusion that
magery is heritable.
Other ideas?
This speculation is linked to an idea for a possible sequel to
_Salamander_. Central to that book was a dangerous consequence of
scientific progress, the science being magery. What if we have progress
in a different science--genetics? The equivalent of Mendel works out the
basic principles and starts applying them to magery.
In my world there are lots of different mage talents and they have only
been well understood for the past fifty years or so. If the genetics is
complicated, one can easily imagine that all anyone used to know was
that there was a modest tendency for the children of mages to be
talented. But once the genetics is worked out ... .
There are now interesting possibilities both for selective breeding by a
government that wants a lot of mages, perhaps for military purposes, and
for individual mages beginning to engage in mate selection on genetic
grounds.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
James A. Donald
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
In my WIP, everyone has magic, in fact magic is what keeps us alive
Life force is magic steering reactions in organic chemistry, soul is
magic steering neuron firing in the brain. The well known real life
irreproducibility of reactions in organic chemistry is explained in
the WIP as a manifestation of the fact organic chemical reactions are
particularly susceptible to magic. Placebo effect, and the bedside
manner effect, are also magical healing.
Some people, however, are very much better at this than others.
Successful organic chemists and suchlike are in fact doing magic
without being aware of it. Sorcerers and suchlike *are* aware of it.
The ability to use magic successfully is in large part training, which
runs in families and apprenticeships, partly innate soul abilities,
which is not hereditary, though some kinds of souls have particular
affiliations to particular families, particular races, or particular
animals, and in part hereditary. The race that is most able at magic
is long lived, but has serious fertility problems, and has difficulty
remaining healthy in a low magic environment, and is particularly
vulnerable to counter magic magic, plus supernatural beings are pissed
off at them for various reasons. Another measure is that people
capture demons and assimilate them - reverse possession - so some
people use magical power to gain more magical power, much as wealth
tends to produce wealth, resulting in large discrepancies of wealth.
> 1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
> biological side effect such as lower fertility.
In my WIP there is no necessary connection, but the family of the main
character is trying to breed for adequate fertility combined with
adequate magical talents, implying it is hard to achieve both at once,
but possible to achieve both at once.
> 2. Young mages often kill themselves in the process of learning to use
> their talent; in my world that is true at least of fire mages.
In my world, true for transformations and magical healing - you are
apt to wind up undead, transformed into a non viable form, or
irreversibly transformed into non sentient form.
> 3. The use of magery has negative biological side effects--perhaps it is
> so exhausting that mages are more prone to diseases and accidents than
> other people.
In my WIP magic can, and frequently does draw on life force, in fact
that is the normal and natural way to do it. However, there have been
recent breakthroughs allowing people to draw on other forms of magical
energy. Paralleling our own world history of human power, slave
power, animal power (horse collar) coal power and nuclear power, their
history has them drawing on their own power, prayer power, discovering
ways to draw on other people's life force, (vampirism) then non human
creatures life force, then they discover means for tapping the
underlying chaos of the universe, which process unfortunately causes
serious magical pollution.
As a result of these breakthroughs, people skilled in the art can now
exercise a great deal of power, whereas formerly power was limited to
quite modest levels. So pretty much everyone can and does do the old
fashioned magic, but only an elite few can do the newer and
considerably more powerful magic.
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic explanation--something
> entirely different might be going on. Suppose there are beings--not
> necessarily conscious--which I will call mageons. There are a fixed
> number of them, they are immortal, and they attach themselves to humans
> at birth; a human with a mageon has magical talent. Mageons tend to
> attract each other, so the child of a mage or a mage couple is more
> likely to have a mageon nearby when he is born, giving the illusion that
> magery is heritable.
Call them souls. That is what I do.
--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/ James A. Donald
Kat R
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
>
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get all the
glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
Not that a certain Alma hasn't pretty well beaten me to a lot of the
idea, already, too.... Phooness! I was feeling rather rotten because of
a bad contract development and now this. Phoo, phoo, phoo!
--
Kat Richardson
Greywalker (Roc, 2006)
Website: http://www.katrichardson.com/
Bloggery: http://katrich.wordpress.com/
Elf M. Sternberg
> Other ideas?
>
> This speculation is linked to an idea for a possible sequel to
> _Salamander_. Central to that book was a dangerous consequence of
> scientific progress, the science being magery. What if we have progress
> in a different science--genetics? The equivalent of Mendel works out the
> basic principles and starts applying them to magery.
In the Mora universe, magic is a function of the environment;
the "naturalistic" universe you and I inhabit is in fact a rare thing,
and on the scale of conscious creatures magic is commonplace. The
Earth just happens to be moving through a magic-free zone of the
galaxy right now, but in a few centuries it'll come back, so although
magic is innate, only those most sensitive to it are aware of it right
now.
In the Aimee' universe magic is cyclical in that when there
are enough mages, you get the magickal equivalent of a hard-liftoff
singularity, with a tidal release of magic at the end of the cycle
that sucks almost every mage into a "it's so blindingly obvious I
*must* get in on it!" event. These are rare, happening every thousand
years or so, and are generally bad mostly for the nobility. The mad
scramble to acquire the few surviving neophytic mages left afterward,
and their relative utility, has for the most part inhibited a lot of
technological development. "Everyone knows you need mages to do
that, and we don't have any right now."
In the Jane universe, magic *is* technological in nature, but
the poor suckers can barely grind lenses, much less understand the
nanotechnology swirling around them.
Elf
Bill Swears
bearers of certain responsibilities from generation to generation. My
own WIES (work in endless submission) has one instance of something like
that, but everybody has magic. It's just that not everybody has enough
magic to benefit the community, so they just use it for personal things.
I notice the here on Earth, almost anybody could be a pilot, but only a
few do so. That is a consolidation of talent, physical ability,
interest, and drive.
But on the genetic side, perfect 20/20 or better vision is a lifesaving
natural ability, yet more and more people need vision correction as the
generations go on. Maybe non-magic users attract more sympathy, hence
marry and reproduce as often, and magic is a recessive?
Bill
--
Ourdebate.com lifts free debate between writers and dilutes it with ads.
rec.arts.sf.composition is a USENET group, and can be accessed for free.
Ourdebate.com therefore sucks (the life from discourse),
and dribbles (deceit when integrity would have worked just as well).
Alma Hromic Deckert
wrote:
>David Friedman wrote:
>> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
>> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
>> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
>> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
>> than if he did not have it.
>>
>> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
>> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>
>
>Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
>been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
>that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get all the
>glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
>
>Not that a certain Alma hasn't pretty well beaten me to a lot of the
>idea, already, too.... Phooness! I was feeling rather rotten because of
>a bad contract development and now this. Phoo, phoo, phoo!
<small voice> sorry... I certainly have no wishto add to any
unpleasantnessesssss....
But the idea's free, innit? What YOU do with it is probably going to
have very little to do with what I've done with it in
"Worldweavers"...
A. (which, by the way, is officially out tomorrow... )
Tina Hall
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more
> status, than if he did not have it.
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the
> usual Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
My thinking. (Well, close to it. I don't see why only few humans
should have it to begin with.)
As you might guess, I'm not fond of finding excuses for the
traditional approach of a few lone wizards, mages, witches, whatever
muddling about in dark corners, towers, whatever, but instead all in
favour of magic for everone on a world that has magic.
But, to take my attempts at fantasy with gods as example... If you
have gods, then magic can be selectively granted to only a few.
> Several possibilities occurred to me:
> 1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
> biological side effect such as lower fertility.
That would have to be a bit better explained for me to buy it.
> 2. Young mages often kill themselves in the process of learning to use
> their talent; in my world that is true at least of fire mages.
That would depend on the magic system, though.
You might think of spells and ingredients, gestures and whatnot,
where I think of something that's done easily, obvious, learned
along with walking upright. Magic as just another limb to do things
with.
> 3. The use of magery has negative biological side effects--perhaps it
> is so exhausting that mages are more prone to diseases and accidents
> than other people.
Wouldn't that mean that the trait either died out, or they developed
resistances?
> 4. The use of magery has negative behavioral side effects--negative, of
> course, from the standpoint of reproductive success. Perhaps it is so
> absorbing that mages are unlikely to marry and raise children. Perhaps
> the society is one in which most women would prefer to bear fewer
> children than they do; female mages can and do use their talent to keep
> themselves from getting pregnant.
So after one generation of magic users, no offspring was produced
that has the trait. <g>
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic explanation--something
> entirely different might be going on. Suppose there are beings--not
> necessarily conscious--which I will call mageons. There are a fixed
> number of them, they are immortal, and they attach themselves to humans
> at birth; a human with a mageon has magical talent. Mageons tend to
> attract each other, so the child of a mage or a mage couple is more
> likely to have a mageon nearby when he is born, giving the illusion
> that magery is heritable.
Hm. Interesting approach. (In the sense of very strange, but
fascinating to look at. From a distance. :) )
--
Tina
WIP: Seasons & Elements trilogy #3 37171 words
WISuspension: Magic Earth series
Posted to Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition.
Graham Woodland
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
>
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>
In my Bat Sea Coast world, anyone can invoke occasional wild involuntary
magic, but reliable talents are the province of those whose ability,
character, deeds, and living legend -- what I might abbreviate as _mana_ in
the non-mechanical sense -- compels it. Most royalty has it, even the
complete asses, because of the way people feel about royalty in most
places. All heroes and great artists or crafters have some.
Why don't we get selection in favour of Great People until everybody has the
trait? Why isn't everybody an Alexander, a Hypatia, or a Michaelangelo by
now? It could well be argued that the elusive 'extra' of true genius as
opposed to some particular intelligence is the closest parallel to magic
our world affords, after all. It's certainly the parallel that works on
the BSC.
However, the ability to *manipulate* magic and be a 'wizard' really is rare
there. No explanation of the mechanics is given, but evidence suggests
that all wizards are enormously intelligent (why doesn't everybody have
top-grade intelligence?), and tend to have minds which are a weird
combination of the ravenously omnivorous and the peculiarly hobby-horsish.
The latter characteristic, and magic's natural tendency to follow poetic
rather than literal lines just as water flows downhill, tends to make all
really significant wizards very different from each other. I also note
that only two of the named wizards in that world are married, and one of
them is long-separated and basically Lemminkainen on a pension, so he
doesn't really count. None are mentioned as having children. I suspect
count (4) is involved here, but I don't know: certainly most of the wizards
appear to have reasonably active libidos.
And then there's sorcery, the purest and dangerously snowbally form of
meta-magic. On the evidence of _Eyebright_ and the Epic Doggerel, the very
rare people who can master this are rather cold and incredibly
unsentimental, probably because anyone with normal emotions and this
particular inclination is soon warping reality so much that they've
exterminated themselves, or been quietly murdered in their sleep, by early
adolescence at best. It's implicitly suggested elsewhere that only in the
modern generation, when ambient magic levels have declined to a historic
low, has it been even possible to develop sorcery without disappearing in a
puff of primal chaos. So that's your (2), with knobs on, plus a more
intense version of the above (4).
> Several possibilities occurred to me:
>
> 1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
> biological side effect such as lower fertility.
>
> 2. Young mages often kill themselves in the process of learning to use
> their talent; in my world that is true at least of fire mages.
>
> 3. The use of magery has negative biological side effects--perhaps it is
> so exhausting that mages are more prone to diseases and accidents than
> other people.
>
> 4. The use of magery has negative behavioral side effects--negative, of
> course, from the standpoint of reproductive success. Perhaps it is so
> absorbing that mages are unlikely to marry and raise children. Perhaps
> the society is one in which most women would prefer to bear fewer
> children than they do; female mages can and do use their talent to keep
> themselves from getting pregnant.
>
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic explanation--something
> entirely different might be going on. Suppose there are beings--not
> necessarily conscious--which I will call mageons. There are a fixed
> number of them, they are immortal, and they attach themselves to humans
> at birth; a human with a mageon has magical talent. Mageons tend to
> attract each other, so the child of a mage or a mage couple is more
> likely to have a mageon nearby when he is born, giving the illusion that
> magery is heritable.
>
--
Cheers,
Gray
Dan Goodman
> While discussing the world of Salamander with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in
> many fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent,
> which at least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It
> is useful; someone with that talent is likely to have a higher
> income, more status, than if he did not have it.
>
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the
> usual Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>
> Several possibilities occurred to me:
>
> 1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
> biological side effect such as lower fertility.
Everything has side-effects.
> 2. Young mages often kill themselves in the process of learning to
> use their talent; in my world that is true at least of fire mages.
>
> 3. The use of magery has negative biological side effects--perhaps it
> is so exhausting that mages are more prone to diseases and accidents
> than other people.
>
> 4. The use of magery has negative behavioral side effects--negative,
> of course, from the standpoint of reproductive success. Perhaps it is
> so absorbing that mages are unlikely to marry and raise children.
> Perhaps the society is one in which most women would prefer to bear
> fewer children than they do; female mages can and do use their talent
> to keep themselves from getting pregnant.
Or perhaps embryos using magic have adverse effects on their mothers'
health.
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic
> explanation--something entirely different might be going on. Suppose
> there are beings--not necessarily conscious--which I will call
> mageons. There are a fixed number of them, they are immortal, and
> they attach themselves to humans at birth; a human with a mageon has
> magical talent. Mageons tend to attract each other, so the child of a
> mage or a mage couple is more likely to have a mageon nearby when he
> is born, giving the illusion that magery is heritable.
>
> Other ideas?
Joanna Russ's "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" has lack of magical
talent as conferring immunity to harm from magical creatures.
Let's see: Using magic depletes certain vitamins and/or trace minerals
in the mage's body, so they require more of it than most people do.
Mages are more vulnerable to magic-using bacteria.
> This speculation is linked to an idea for a possible sequel to
> Salamander. Central to that book was a dangerous consequence of
> scientific progress, the science being magery. What if we have
> progress in a different science--genetics? The equivalent of Mendel
> works out the basic principles and starts applying them to magery.
>
> In my world there are lots of different mage talents and they have
> only been well understood for the past fifty years or so. If the
> genetics is complicated, one can easily imagine that all anyone used
> to know was that there was a modest tendency for the children of
> mages to be talented. But once the genetics is worked out ... .
>
> There are now interesting possibilities both for selective breeding
> by a government that wants a lot of mages, perhaps for military
> purposes, and for individual mages beginning to engage in mate
> selection on genetic grounds.
--
Dan Goodman
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
future http://dangoodman.livejournal.com
Links http://del.icio.us/dsgood
Patricia C. Wrede
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
news:ddfr-0F5A36.2...@news.isp.giganews.com...
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
Is the talent itself actually moderately rare, or is it only rare at a level
where it's blindingly obvious and anyone with the least grain of sense would
get it trained and use it? In other words, is it possible that magic talent
is well-distributed through the population, but at a level that requires
detection and/or training that hasn't been invented yet?
Another thing is, if you're talking genetics, you aren't talking historical
timelines. Higher income, more status, etc. will *eventually* have an
impact on selection for magical talent, if it's genetic, but if the ability
to work magic wasn't *already* a survival trait, it's not going to be
well-distributed just because, sometime in the last few thousand years,
people finally learned how to develop, train, and use it.
Another possibility is that magic is *too* widely distributed -- that is,
your mages are specialists, right? Fire-mages, water mages, etc. If each
of those specialties requires its own gene pair, and if those genes
interfere with each other, then someone who has the correct pairing for,
say, fire magic *and* the correct pairing for air magic won't be able to do
any magic at all, because of the interference.
And there's no reason to think that magic using is a dominant trait, even if
its a valuable one.
Finally -- for Pete's sake, it's *magic*. It doesn't have to follow the
laws of the natural world as we know them in real life. Even if you want it
to have a genetic basis, magic-genetics doesn't have to follow the rules of
real genetics. Magic genes may act very differently, appearing and
disappearing at will, or be inherited by some sort of
similarity-and-contagion effect rather than by normal parent-to-child, or be
expressed only under certain conditions (some of which may themselves
involve magic).
Patricia C. Wrede
Gerry Quinn
dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com says...
> In my world there are lots of different mage talents and they have only
> been well understood for the past fifty years or so. If the genetics is
> complicated, one can easily imagine that all anyone used to know was
> that there was a modest tendency for the children of mages to be
> talented. But once the genetics is worked out ... .
'Lots of different talents' doesn't sound too much like it has a
genetic cause. Why would one gene evolve for fire magic, one for
healing, etc.?
Of course if there are such genes, maybe the only powerful mages are
homozygotes for one kind.
- Gerry Quinn
Charlie Allery
"Alma Hromic Deckert" <ang...@vaxer.net> wrote in message
news:s0fcv2de77vg46ptf...@4ax.com...
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:34:11 -0700, Kat R <null....@lycos.com>
> wrote:
>
>>David Friedman wrote:
>>> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>>> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
>>> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
>>> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
>>> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
>>> than if he did not have it.
>>>
>>> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
>>> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>>
>>
>>Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
>>been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
>>that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get all the
>>glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
>>
Yeah, I have a short that I just can't pull together properly that kind of
uses this idea.
>>Not that a certain Alma hasn't pretty well beaten me to a lot of the
>>idea, already, too.... Phooness! I was feeling rather rotten because of
>>a bad contract development and now this. Phoo, phoo, phoo!
>
*shrug* World-view similarities don't bother me. Especially in fantasy. It's
kind of like saying, okay, so I have this big space dock orbiting jupiter
where my SF story is set. Doesn't need to be unique by any means. I
understand it's more offputting if you had thought it was going to be a
unique worldview, but really, there are so many of us out here.
> <small voice> sorry... I certainly have no wishto add to any
> unpleasantnessesssss....
>
> But the idea's free, innit? What YOU do with it is probably going to
> have very little to do with what I've done with it in
> "Worldweavers"...
>
Precisely! *g*
> A. (which, by the way, is officially out tomorrow... )
Woohoo!
Charlie
Charlie Allery
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
news:ddfr-0F5A36.2...@news.isp.giganews.com...
My WIR is a world with magic, but is set in the only country in which it
can't work. :-) You might tell from this that I didn't want to include magic
in the story. Of course, having admitted its existence and explained its
absence, I found my best plotline lay in having a single spell that was
working when it shouldn't have been.
As a result I really haven't considered the distribution of magical talent
in the rest of the world. I think I'm tending towards it being a natural
phenomenon that some people (after long training and perhaps with the
augmentation of magical objects) have a greater natural ability to control.
Hmmm, that sounds right. My one mage character becomes far more interested
in the ways my country has found to do tasks that elsewhere would have
magical assistance.
Charlie
Tina Hall
> David Friedman wrote:
>> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in
>> many fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent,
>> which at least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It
>> is useful; someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income,
>> more status, than if he did not have it.
>>
>> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the
>> usual Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
> Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
> been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
> that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get all the
> glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
Why? His could be hidden (and unaccessible), or lost.
(Ok, that's just two possibilities from the ME. I've got a character
who would qualify as disabled here, for his inability to do even the
most common things with magic, like cleaning himself. The only thing
he can do takes too long and all his efforts. The explanation is
that, if someone tries to access their magic in the wilderness with
too much liquid water around, they'll lose it permanently, so
everyone who meets him thinks that's what happened to him. He just
thinks he's born that way, and no one knows better.)
I'm sure you could come up with something that happened to your
character while he was still a baby, if you want to. (Baby, because
then he wouldn't know it differently.)
Poliwog
> "David Friedman" <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
>
> news:ddfr-0F5A36.2...@news.isp.giganews.com...
>
> > While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> > interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> > fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> > least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> > someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> > than if he did not have it.
Huh?
As you KNOW, when Yahweh the Mighty created the Earth in 4004 BC in
Allentown, PA, he limited the number of mages to .001% of the total
population. Are you questioning Him?
IOW, once you have gods and magic in the mix, genetics fly out the
window. This is not an absolute, of course; you can have a world with
genetics being the only factor in evolution, but in fantasy, you
needn't do so.
Elf M. Sternberg
> In the Jane universe, magic *is* technological in nature, but
> the poor suckers can barely grind lenses, much less understand the
> nanotechnology swirling around them.
Arrrgh! That's what I get for usenetting before bedtime. The
*Janae* universe, dammit.
Elf
Mary K. Kuhner
Poliwog <wog...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>IOW, once you have gods and magic in the mix, genetics fly out the
>window. This is not an absolute, of course; you can have a world with
>genetics being the only factor in evolution, but in fantasy, you
>needn't do so.
Even if you have magical or divine intervention, the evolutionary
process will be chugging away in the background whenever and wherever
it isn't actively being balked. (Of course, a high-magic setting
might balk it all the time, probably by divine intervention: these
are the created kinds and they aren't going to change! Hm, I couldn't
write that story with a straight face....)
If you, say, put magicians on a pedestal and never let them marry,
you're going to do *something* to your gene pool. You'll probably
do something even if magic itself isn't heritable, if there's any
genetic component at *all* to becoming a mage.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-0F5A36.2...@news.isp.giganews.com...
> > While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> > interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> > fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> > least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> > someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> > than if he did not have it.
>
> Is the talent itself actually moderately rare, or is it only rare at a level
> where it's blindingly obvious and anyone with the least grain of sense would
> get it trained and use it? In other words, is it possible that magic talent
> is well-distributed through the population, but at a level that requires
> detection and/or training that hasn't been invented yet?
In my world, essentially everyone has some talent--that's one of the
"results of modern science" that the students are introduced to in the
first lecture at the College. But only a small minority have enough
talent to be mages. For the others, talent means a hunter who is luckier
than he ought to be, a farmer with a green thumb, and the like. So the
puzzle still exists.
>
> Another thing is, if you're talking genetics, you aren't talking historical
> timelines. Higher income, more status, etc. will *eventually* have an
> impact on selection for magical talent, if it's genetic, but if the ability
> to work magic wasn't *already* a survival trait, it's not going to be
> well-distributed just because, sometime in the last few thousand years,
> people finally learned how to develop, train, and use it.
Interesting question. Magery isn't seen as something new, although the
scientific understanding of it is. But I don't know if it's a thousand
years old or a hundred thousand.
Whether one would expect evolutionary change in historical time depends,
of course, on how great the selective pressure is. If mages had twice
the reproductive success of other people, the frequency of magery would
go up by orders of magnitude in a few centuries.
> Another possibility is that magic is *too* widely distributed -- that is,
> your mages are specialists, right? Fire-mages, water mages, etc. If each
> of those specialties requires its own gene pair, and if those genes
> interfere with each other, then someone who has the correct pairing for,
> say, fire magic *and* the correct pairing for air magic won't be able to do
> any magic at all, because of the interference.
That's part of the idea I was thinking of if I wanted to introduce the
effects of a Gregor Mendel type. Random mating of mages results in only
a slight increase in the probability of talented children. But once the
genetics are understood, you can predict which mages you have to cross
to get what results.
In my world, it isn't as simple as specialists. A fire mage is someone
who has more talent in the fire point of the elemental star than in
anything else, but he probably has some talent in at least one other
point of one of the basis stars. One of my two protagonists pools fire
and weaving talents, and it's odd only because she is very strong in
both. Her mother is a very talented weaving mage, her father one of the
strongest fire mages ever known to have existed. Obviously that example,
which exists for plot reasons, suggests very simple genetics, but I'm
assuming that if the same couple had other children they probably
wouldn't end up that way--that it's a possibility but not a likely one.
> And there's no reason to think that magic using is a dominant trait, even if
> its a valuable one.
In my world it isn't as simple as a single dominant gene. It looks as
though mages are somewhat more likely to have talented children than
other people, but most talented individuals don't have talented parents.
> Finally -- for Pete's sake, it's *magic*. It doesn't have to follow the
> laws of the natural world as we know them in real life.
Hence my final suggestion.
David Friedman
Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
My guess, given the observed pattern in my world, is that there are two
dimensions to magery, both probably genetic. One determines the pattern
of talents, the other the magnitude. Essentially everyone has some
talents, but only a small minority has whatever characteristics make the
total strength of those talents large enough for a mage.
Probably the second factor determines something like the sum of power
across talents. At least, we are told that someone who has talents in
multiple points is likely to be weaker in each of them than someone most
of whose talent is in one point.
Kat R
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:34:11 -0700, Kat R <null....@lycos.com>
> wrote:
>
>> David Friedman wrote:
>>> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>>> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
>>> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
>>> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
>>> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
>>> than if he did not have it.
>>>
>>> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
>>> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>>
>> Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
>> been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
>> that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get all the
>> glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
>>
>> Not that a certain Alma hasn't pretty well beaten me to a lot of the
>> idea, already, too.... Phooness! I was feeling rather rotten because of
>> a bad contract development and now this. Phoo, phoo, phoo!
>
> <small voice> sorry... I certainly have no wishto add to any
> unpleasantnessesssss....
Feh. It's not you, my dear. I'm just very grumpy over this contract
thing--it's turning into a writer's nightmare.
>
> But the idea's free, innit? What YOU do with it is probably going to
> have very little to do with what I've done with it in
> "Worldweavers"...
>
> A. (which, by the way, is officially out tomorrow... )
Hurray! More Alma books! And no yetis on the cover this time.
Gary F. York
Oh, interesting indeed!
David Friedman wrote:
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
>
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
Perhaps that has, mostly, already happened. But more below.
>
> Several possibilities occurred to me:
>
...
>
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic explanation--something
> entirely different might be going on. Suppose there are beings--not
> necessarily conscious--which I will call mageons. There are a fixed
> number of them, they are immortal, and they attach themselves to humans
> at birth; a human with a mageon has magical talent. Mageons tend to
> attract each other, so the child of a mage or a mage couple is more
> likely to have a mageon nearby when he is born, giving the illusion that
> magery is heritable.
>
> Other ideas?
More of an extension of number 5 than an entirely different idea.
First, scrub 'beings' and substitute 'particles'. So the mageon is a
particle of magic.
To sense or have any ability to manipulate the 'magic field' might first
require a genetic component.
As of Salamander, the understanding of magic seems almost entirely
qualitative; there's an understanding that one person can create larger
effects than another (or different effects) but there's no real
measurement of those differences. We're told that many 'non-magicians'
are still excessively lucky (or competent) and that this may be
attributed to a minor use of magic. The question, "What percentage of
the population can use no magic whatsoever?" is unanswerable at this
time and might never be answered unless some means is devised to
reliably and precisely detect and measure magic potential.
Getting back to mageons, suppose that humans are in certain ways like
atoms and mageons take the role of electrons. Genetics might determine
whether an individual has a 'nucleus' around which mageons can
congregate, and might (or might not) determine the size of the nucleus
and thus, how many mageons one can support.
Can mageons be created or destroyed? Detected?
What happens when a magician dies? Are his mageons destroyed or
released? If released, where do they go? Do 'magical' humans
accumulate their mageons throughout their lifetime, only part of it, at
conception only, as an embryo, at birth or what?
If mageons can neither be created or destroyed, and if magical ability
is proportionate to the number of mageons one has, and if the
distribution of magical ability follows a normal curve, then the very
existence of magicians and the explicit use of magic is threatened by
population growth as a fixed number of mageons become ever more widely
distributed. (If magicians realize this will some try to restrict
population?)
Can mageons be discovered absent the ability to precisely measure magic?
Does each mageon provide a specific 'quanta' of magical ability? (Or
might magical 'quanta' be a factor of the completeness or incompleteness
of mageon 'shells'?
It seems possible that various paradigm shifts in the understanding of
magic could support several sequels. The "Mathematical Magicians"
perhaps being one. (Preceded by, "The Measure of Magic?")
>
> This speculation is linked to an idea for a possible sequel to
> _Salamander_. Central to that book was a dangerous consequence of
> scientific progress, the science being magery. What if we have progress
> in a different science--genetics? The equivalent of Mendel works out the
> basic principles and starts applying them to magery.
It could set back the science of genetics for years if they tried to
apply it to magic and (shucks) it turns out that virtually everyone
already has all the 'magical potential' they're ever going to get from
genetics. :) Environmental factors?
Seems like genetics really opens a can of worms (for you as an author)
if you validate it. One way or another, the genetics you create must
work out to engender the distribution of magical ability you've already
shown in Salamandar.
>
> In my world there are lots of different mage talents and they have only
> been well understood for the past fifty years or so. If the genetics is
> complicated, one can easily imagine that all anyone used to know was
> that there was a modest tendency for the children of mages to be
> talented. But once the genetics is worked out ... .
>
> There are now interesting possibilities both for selective breeding by a
> government that wants a lot of mages, perhaps for military purposes, and
> for individual mages beginning to engage in mate selection on genetic
> grounds.
>
And perhaps they're able, mostly, to select for the kind of magical
ability, but not for strength.
I've noticed that I've discouraged pursuit of the genetic plot; perhaps
that's because, like you, I tend to prefer my conflict between people of
good will rather than a good vs. evil thing -- which seemed the
direction you might be heading. But, thinking about it, I do enjoy a
good 'triumph of individualism over authoritarianism' scenario which is
where you'd likely go with that setup. :) I can see a good story
either way.
Best,
G.
Monique Y. Mudama
>
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic
> explanation--something entirely different might be going on. Suppose
> there are beings--not necessarily conscious--which I will call
> mageons. There are a fixed number of them, they are immortal, and
> they attach themselves to humans at birth; a human with a mageon has
> magical talent. Mageons tend to attract each other, so the child of
> a mage or a mage couple is more likely to have a mageon nearby when
> he is born, giving the illusion that magery is heritable.
>
Please don't. I don't know anyone who was happy with the whole
mitochlorian thing in the more recent Star Wars movies.
--
monique
Kat R
> Kat R <null....@lycos.comPOST> wrote:
>> David Friedman wrote:
>
>>> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>>> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in
>>> many fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent,
>>> which at least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It
>>> is useful; someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income,
>>> more status, than if he did not have it.
>>>
>>> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the
>>> usual Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>
>> Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
>> been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
>> that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get all the
>> glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
>
> Why? His could be hidden (and unaccessible), or lost.
No. The point is that she literally has no magic and is therefore
considered less than human by her culture. I was kind of tired of
stories in which magical ability is a happy (or unhappy) extra to the
normal human condition. The culture I was imagining doesn't see magical
ability as "special"; they consider it a part of basic humanity and
there's never been a "human" who didn't have it that they know of. Even
in the Harry Potter books, most of the wizarding community doesn't think
of muggles as non-human, just sadly crippled. These people don't
consider the protagonist truly human at all, even though she's otherwise
just like them. So it's not a matter of "oh, how sad: she's crippled,"
but of "ugh! what is that freak?!" Eventually she is found to be useful
since she is immune to anything that effects magic.
yeah, yeah... it's trite.
>
> (Ok, that's just two possibilities from the ME. I've got a character
> who would qualify as disabled here, for his inability to do even the
> most common things with magic, like cleaning himself. The only thing
> he can do takes too long and all his efforts. The explanation is
> that, if someone tries to access their magic in the wilderness with
> too much liquid water around, they'll lose it permanently, so
> everyone who meets him thinks that's what happened to him. He just
> thinks he's born that way, and no one knows better.)
>
> I'm sure you could come up with something that happened to your
> character while he was still a baby, if you want to. (Baby, because
> then he wouldn't know it differently.)
>
--
Dan Goodman
> 'Lots of different talents' doesn't sound too much like it has a
> genetic cause.
Why not?
Patricia C. Wrede
But it's a different puzzle, more akin to "why aren't there more geniuses
around?" or "why aren't there more musical prodigies around?" Your mages
are, from this description, at one end of a bell curve. If there is an
evolutionarily significant advantage to being able to use magic to this
degree, the curve will *eventually* move toward that end...but we're talking
"eventually" on a very long time-scale. And if, as you indicate elsewhere,
magery is more than a simple gene-pair effect (which seems eminently
reasonable to me), it's going to take a lot longer for the curve to move,
because of the mixing effect.
Patricia C. Wrede
Monique Y. Mudama
>
> No. The point is that she literally has no magic and is therefore
> considered less than human by her culture. I was kind of tired of
> stories in which magical ability is a happy (or unhappy) extra to
> the normal human condition. The culture I was imagining doesn't see
> magical ability as "special"; they consider it a part of basic
> humanity and there's never been a "human" who didn't have it that
> they know of. Even in the Harry Potter books, most of the wizarding
> community doesn't think of muggles as non-human, just sadly
> crippled. These people don't consider the protagonist truly human
> at all, even though she's otherwise just like them. So it's not a
> matter of "oh, how sad: she's crippled," but of "ugh! what is that
> freak?!" Eventually she is found to be useful since she is immune
> to anything that effects magic.
>
> yeah, yeah... it's trite.
It does sound very familiar, but I can't remember if I've read a story
like this or if I've simply read your story idea before.
--
monique
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> where it's blindingly obvious and anyone with the least grain of sense would
> get it trained and use it? In other words, is it possible that magic talent
> is well-distributed through the population, but at a level that requires
> detection and/or training that hasn't been invented yet?
>
> Another thing is, if you're talking genetics, you aren't talking historical
> timelines. Higher income, more status, etc. will *eventually* have an
> impact on selection for magical talent, if it's genetic, but if the ability
> to work magic wasn't *already* a survival trait, it's not going to be
> well-distributed just because, sometime in the last few thousand years,
> people finally learned how to develop, train, and use it.
In my world where "magic" (in this case, psi ability) is scattered
through the genome, there are a couple of factors in place: one of them
is that higher levels of psi ability tend to attract the predators
(which also have psi). How different cultures have responded to this
varies: the one in which the stories are mostly set happened to get one
hero-figure who had an assortment of powerful psi that *included* "mask
psi", thus survived long enough to figure it out and start a breeding
program (with heavy adoption from the peasantry to make defending cities
easier by concentrating all the psi in one area where the adults could
protect the untrained children). One culture I know of has some sort of
warrior-monk order about which I know little else. One recruits its
tribal warriors and leaders from the particularly talented, but does not
segregate them from the rest of the people. At least one or two kill or
exile anyone who shows signs of talent as soon as they can, because they
attract demons, and who wants that?
I happen to know that people who have a higher level of psi than the
default tend to gravitate towards positions where that help them
succeed, at least in my primary culture; so the crime-lord major minor
character is a bit better at telepathy and telepathic shielding than the
average person. Not enough more so to show up against the background
noise of minds, but enough for an edge.
Evolutionary pressures depend on local conditions.
The straighter fantasy place has *everyone* doing low-level magic, if
they want to. One of the major characters of the piece collects charms
from anyone who will teach him one, just low-level cantrip stuff: how to
get permission from the animals before slaughtering them so the
life-energy won't backlash, the charm to keep knots from coming undone,
the charm to help undo knots, charms to make fire-starting easier,
charms to soothe children, he loves them. The main character's father
is a research wizard who primarily supports his household and his
research on dowsing, finding lost people and objects, and spice imports.
In that world there's a bias towards response to particular forms of
magic that goes with racial stuff. The race called phoenixes are good
at fire magic, naturally; the cave elves (forget what I called them
properly, have to look at the document) live underground because their
magical senses are extremely keen, and the magic flowing in sunlight is
too bright for them. Goblins are largely magic-immune, with all their
magical talent channeling energies into resilience and longevity. Etc.
It's generally treated as a skilled profession, and I think that's about
the place it has in the world; one goes to a wizard for certain things,
just like one goes to a blacksmith for certain things. There are
aptitudes that go into that, but the aptitudes make it easier, and may
make some people unsuitable for the study, but that's the case for
blacksmiths too.
--
Darkhawk - K. H. A. Nicoll - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
Come, take my body (Allelu--)
Come, take my soul (Take my soul--) "Dark Time"
Come, take me over, I want to be whole. October Project
Tim S
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
>
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
One could say the same about any other talent. Why isn't everybody a
superb public speaker, anecdotalist, joke-teller, novelist, poet and
playwright, a brilliant athlete, mathematician, and engineer, in
possession of excellent organisational and managerial skills,
forward-thinking, dynamic, articulate, charming, good-looking, etc, etc,
etc?
Tim
Brett Paul Dunbar
Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> writes
>While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
>fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
>least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
>someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
>than if he did not have it.
>
>So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
>Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>
>
>biological side effect such as lower fertility.
Even better might be: Exposure to an intense magical field affects
fertility. The more magic in the environment the less fertile you are.
Mages use a lot of magic and therefore generate an intense magical flux
around themselves. Spells may leave behind waste with an intense magical
field. Mages may also like to hang around areas with a high background
level of magic they, and their apprentices and servants, are then likely
to have a lower level of fertility than the general population.
Extending the metaphor of magic as radioactivity further, magically
active waste may cause other effects, as it's magic you can be quite
creative with that.
--
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
Livejournal http://brett-dunbar.livejournal.com/
Brett Paul Dunbar
To email me, use reply-to address
Tina Hall
> Tina Hall wrote:
>> Kat R <null....@lycos.comPOST> wrote:
>>> David Friedman wrote:
>>>> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the
>>>> usual Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>>
>>> Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
>>> been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a
>>> world that's rife with "small magic". Of course the "big talents" get
>>> all the glory and so on, but they also get all the danger.
>>
>> Why? His could be hidden (and unaccessible), or lost.
> No. The point is that she literally has no magic and is therefore
> considered less than human by her culture.
Oh, ok.
> I was kind of tired of stories in which magical ability is a happy
> (or unhappy) extra to the normal human condition.
You speak one of my many complaints. :)
> The culture I was imagining doesn't see magical ability as
> "special"; they consider it a part of basic humanity and there's
> never been a "human" who didn't have it that they know of.
Yay! (I do hope you find a reason to get your character without
magic in that setting.)
> Even in the Harry Potter books, most of the wizarding community doesn't
> think of muggles as non-human, just sadly crippled. These people don't
> consider the protagonist truly human at all, even though she's
> otherwise just like them. So it's not a matter of "oh, how sad: she's
> crippled," but of "ugh! what is that freak?!" Eventually she is found
> to be useful since she is immune to anything that effects magic.
> yeah, yeah... it's trite.
I like it. And it depends on the execution whether it looks trite in
the end.
Could it be a mutation? A new 'magic' talent? (After all, it's got
to do with magic.)
Ric Locke
> In message <ddfr-0F5A36.2...@news.isp.giganews.com>, David
> Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> writes
>>While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
>>interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
>>fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
>>least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
>>someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
>>than if he did not have it.
>>
>>So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
>>Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
>>
>>Several possibilities occurred to me:
>>
>>1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
>>biological side effect such as lower fertility.
>
> Even better might be: Exposure to an intense magical field affects
> fertility. The more magic in the environment the less fertile you are.
>
> Mages use a lot of magic and therefore generate an intense magical flux
> around themselves. Spells may leave behind waste with an intense magical
> field. Mages may also like to hang around areas with a high background
> level of magic they, and their apprentices and servants, are then likely
> to have a lower level of fertility than the general population.
> Extending the metaphor of magic as radioactivity further, magically
> active waste may cause other effects, as it's magic you can be quite
> creative with that.
ObSF: /The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump/
Regards,
Ric
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
JJ Karhu
There are so many different ways a single idea can be done that I
don't think anybody needs to worry.
I mean, Jim Butcher's Codex Alera books basically use this same idea.
// JJ
Kat R
No, it's probably just trite. I haven't written it up here before.
--
Kat Richardson
Greywalker (2006), Poltergeist (2007)
Kat R
>
> ObSF: /The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump/
>
> Regards,
> Ric
>
hehehe... that was a fun book.
Brian M. Scott
<kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote in
<news:qs5ev2ts8r38kgg29...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:16:14 -0000, "Charlie Allery"
> <cha...@charlieallery.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>"Alma Hromic Deckert" <ang...@vaxer.net> wrote in message
>>news:s0fcv2de77vg46ptf...@4ax.com...
>>> On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:34:11 -0700, Kat R <null....@lycos.com>
>>> wrote:
[...]
>>>>Drat you, David. There goes another perfectly good story idea. I've
>>>>been toying with the idea of a character who has none at all in a world
>>>>that's rife with "small magic". [...]
>>Yeah, I have a short that I just can't pull together properly that kind of
>>uses this idea.
>>>>Not that a certain Alma hasn't pretty well beaten me to a lot of the
>>>>idea, already, too.... Phooness! I was feeling rather rotten because of
>>>>a bad contract development and now this. Phoo, phoo, phoo!
>>*shrug* World-view similarities don't bother me. Especially in fantasy. It's
>>kind of like saying, okay, so I have this big space dock orbiting jupiter
>>where my SF story is set. Doesn't need to be unique by any means. I
>>understand it's more offputting if you had thought it was going to be a
>>unique worldview, but really, there are so many of us out here.
>>> <small voice> sorry... I certainly have no wishto add to any
>>> unpleasantnessesssss....
>>> But the idea's free, innit? What YOU do with it is probably going to
>>> have very little to do with what I've done with it in
>>> "Worldweavers"...
>>Precisely! *g*
> There are so many different ways a single idea can be done that I
> don't think anybody needs to worry.
> I mean, Jim Butcher's Codex Alera books basically use this same idea.
For three volumes, so far.
<spoiler space>
<more>
More accurately, for *almost* three volumes.
Brian
Joel Polowin
wrote:
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
I liked the way the subject was handled in the Liavek universe.
Everyone had the innate potential to do magic, with varying levels
of native ability, and everyone could do at least very tiny magical
things under very limited circumstances. But to be able to do greater
works required performing a challenging ritual, repeated annually,
and though the process got somewhat less difficult with practise it
never got easy... and failure to complete the ritual successfully led
to death within a few days. And even when the ritual was done
successfully, a lot of study and practise was needed to use the skills
effectively. So most people simply didn't bother; they felt that the
risks outweighed the probable benefits.
One of the factors which influenced a person's innate ability level,
and the probability of success in the ritual, was how long one's
mother had been in labour. Thus, there were risks and personal costs
set against increasing that ability.
--
Enterprise and TARDIS: Murphotropic or Murphogenic?
JR Holmes
distribution of magic proficiency, we need to consider additional
social factors that might mitigate against the apparent advantage
spreading throughout the population.
Consider the classic The Marching Morons or the recent similar movie:
Idiocracy. Even though a trait offers an advantage, it may not be one
which is sufficient to allow more offspring to reproduce.
--
JR Holmes
jrholmes <at> wi.rr.com
Tina Hall
> If you want to draw an analogy between distribution of genius and
> the distribution of magic proficiency,
The link actually exists in my Magic Earth series. :) The amount of
magic someone can handle depends solely on their mental capability.
For most people that's average[*], with a few above average, and the
very rare genius. The overall average ability has risen within the
last 10k years, much like real people's ability to invent and
perform ever more complicated things increased.
[*] So common that people use it to clean themselves, cook (only the
untrained cook with water - and they throw away any broth with the
waste), construction, dressmaking, farming, healing,... You wouldn't
even get a proper job without at least some training.
> we need to consider additional social factors that might mitigate
> against the apparent advantage spreading throughout the
> population.
Once everyone's got some, it's just like any other ability. I think
the main advantage is at the point in time where the first humans,
way back when the Earth was still flat, got to use magic, while
others had none. For me, a setting needs a history that allows for
that (rather than just inserting magic into any setting similar to a
period in our past).
James Eades
I would guess - because it's blessed hard work to develop the talent,
even if everyone has it. Not everyone has the stamina, the drive, or
the desire to become an accomplished mage. Some would rather be poets
or use the creative genius to paint murals (ads on the walls of
merchants in the town square ;-).
__
JamesE
R.L.
/snip/
> I think
> the main advantage is at the point in time where the first humans,
> way back when the Earth was still flat, got to use magic, while
> others had none.
Before Tolkien bent it? :-)
R.L.
--
del...@sonic.net works, emails welcome
http://houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com/
David Goldfarb
Monique Y. Mudama <sp...@bounceswoosh.org> wrote:
> I don't know anyone who was happy with the whole
>mitochlorian thing in the more recent Star Wars movies.
I don't know about *happy* with it, but there were some people on
this very group who were pleased...because of the discussions/disputes
about the terms "mode" and "mode violation". A lot of people found
these useful terms, but a lot of others just didn't get it. Then
along came this dandy example of a mode violation, one so blatant
that nearly anyone could see from it what was meant.
--
David Goldfarb | BANG! BANG! BANG! "Fire the tachyon guns!"
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- David Danzig
Rob Kerr
news:slrnevds0...@home.bounceswoosh.org:
> It does sound very familiar, but I can't remember if I've read a
> story like this or if I've simply read your story idea before.
Weis & Hickman did a similar riff in their 'Sword' trilogy. Everyone
has magic to one degree or another, even to unusably low amounts. The
protag is born with absolutely none -- the custom with such freaks is
to kill them at birth (putting them out of their misery). But this one
is born royal, and his mother intervenes. Triggering, IIRC, the
collapse of the whole system of magic, and the ushering in of a new age
of technology. It was entirely not the ending I'd expected, and quite
grim -- techology was seen as dirty, machines ugly. And they were,
compared with the magic.
Rob Kerr
--
"It's impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making
some other Englishman despise him."
-- G.B.S., "Pygmalion"
Gerry Quinn
dsg...@iphouse.com says...
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> > 'Lots of different talents' doesn't sound too much like it has a
> > genetic cause.
>
> Why not?
To re-instate the bit you snipped: "Why would one gene evolve for fire
magic, one for healing, etc.?".
We have multiple talents, but everyone can be trained to drive a car,
or dance, or compose music, after some fashion.
- Gerry Quinn
Tina Hall
>> It does sound very familiar, but I can't remember if I've read a
>> story like this or if I've simply read your story idea before.
> Weis & Hickman did a similar riff in their 'Sword' trilogy. Everyone
> has magic to one degree or another, even to unusably low amounts. The
> protag is born with absolutely none --
This reminds me that in Goodkinds Sword of Truth series, everyone
has minimum (unusable) amounts of magic, too, except some kids from
the bad guy (normally killed) and presumably his male ancestors, who
have none and are immune to magic. (I should have remembered this
earlier in this thread, but didn't.)
The cause, IIRC, was some magic worked for a particular purpose
(long before the story), and the kids a side-effect, or something.
> the custom with such freaks is to kill them at birth (putting them
> out of their misery).
The ones in the above series are killed (or hunted, if their mothers
somehow escape), too. But the supposed good guys have the habit to
kill infants they don't want to bother with, too. (It's really quite
warped, and I concluded that the supposed bad guys had it right all
along. Unfortunately the series is not about them, so I stopped
reading.)
> But this one is born royal, and his mother intervenes.
> Triggering, IIRC, the collapse of the whole system of magic, and
> the ushering in of a new age of technology. It was entirely not
> the ending I'd expected, and quite grim -- techology was seen as
> dirty, machines ugly. And they were, compared with the magic.
That would be appealing if it were shown somewhere in passing, and a
reason why they don't use technology. :)
Tina Hall
> Tina Hall wrote:
>> I think the main advantage is at the point in time where the
>> first humans, way back when the Earth was still flat, got to use
>> magic, while others had none.
> Before Tolkien bent it? :-)
Ew. No. I wasn't talking about LotR, or whatever else he wrote. I
don't know how you get that bore into it in the first place.
Standard assumption would be way back when before our Earth was
still flat, as meaning some variably long time ago. Whatever setting
is being talked about may have a comparable moment in its past, and
in this case got to use magic where we didn't.
Charlton Wilbur
DF> So why don't we get selection in favor of [magical] talent
DF> until, by the usual Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
DF> Several possibilities occurred to me:
DF> 4. The use of magery has negative behavioral side
DF> effects--negative, of course, from the standpoint of
DF> reproductive success. Perhaps it is so absorbing that mages
DF> are unlikely to marry and raise children. Perhaps the society
DF> is one in which most women would prefer to bear fewer children
DF> than they do; female mages can and do use their talent to keep
DF> themselves from getting pregnant.
4a. The level of effort and commitment required to be a successful
mage -- meditation, research, practice, craftwork in general, politics
and advancement within magical orders that control access to magical
resources -- is so high that it is difficult to have a normal family
life.
This means that mages have a choice between being powerful and
accomplished and having a stable family life.
You can see this pattern in academics and people on the partner track
in major law firms. High-powered lawyers make an incredible amount of
money and have a lot of status, but the amount of time one needs to
invest in being a high-powered lawyer means one does not have much of
a social or personal life. Many aspiring lawyers burn out in the
first few years, or give it up to go have a less stressful life.
And academics have a lot of status in some circles, but the level of
commitment required to get the necessary education and the horrific
politics surrounding hiring, promotion, and tenure mean that a lot of
people give up.
DF> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic
DF> explanation--something entirely different might be going on.
Or, considering the lawyer or academic examples, perhaps the aptitude
for magic is a combination of magical talent, verbal flexibility,
creativity, critical thought, and logical analysis, each one of which
is partially genetic and partially developmental. The only people who
will become high-powered mages are the ones who have the combination
of favorable genes, favorable environment, and appropriate training --
just as the only people who become high-powered lawyers are the ones
who have the right inherent aptitude, a supportive environment at
about the right time, and the right education and credentialling.
The real-world analogue would be breeding for intelligence.
Charlton
--
Charlton Wilbur
cwi...@chromatico.net
Monique Y. Mudama
> JR Holmes <jrho...@wi.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> If you want to draw an analogy between distribution of genius and
>> the distribution of magic proficiency,
>
> The link actually exists in my Magic Earth series. :) The amount of
> magic someone can handle depends solely on their mental capability.
> For most people that's average[*], with a few above average, and the
> very rare genius. The overall average ability has risen within the
> last 10k years, much like real people's ability to invent and
> perform ever more complicated things increased.
Meh. That feels too obvious to me. Or maybe just unfair. Isn't
being super-intelligent enough of a bonus?
Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've read many (any?) stories where
someone of sub-average intelligence has great magical abilities.
--
monique
David Friedman
Charlton Wilbur <cwi...@chromatico.net> wrote:
> DF> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic
> DF> explanation--something entirely different might be going on.
>
> Or, considering the lawyer or academic examples, perhaps the aptitude
> for magic is a combination of magical talent, verbal flexibility,
> creativity, critical thought, and logical analysis, each one of which
> is partially genetic and partially developmental.
My argument was actually about the talent alone. Ceteris paribus it is
an advantage, it is (in my first four cases) heritable, so why doesn't
it get selected for.
Various people pointed out that there are lots of partly heritable
talents in our world that not everybody has. That too is an interesting
puzzle, to which there are a number of possible explanations, to some
extent paralleling the ones I offered for magical talent:
1. There is a direct reproductive cost. IQ correlates with skull size,
and skull size of infant with death in childbirth of mother.
2. There is a behavioral reproductive cost. Smart people are smart
enough to evade the genetic programming that tries to make them serve
the interest of their genes (reproductive success) and manage to serve
their own interest instead.
3. The advantage of intelligence is a declining function of the number
of intelligent individuals, and at some point goes negative--perhaps
because intelligent individuals are seen as dangerous by others, perhaps
for other reasons.
4. There is no way of reliably producing intelligent individuals--the
construction problem is too hard. So the genes do their best, sometimes
succeed sometimes fail badly. This is the "sports car" analogy--sports
ars perform better than ordinary cars--when they work.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
Jonathan L Cunningham
[genetic basis for magery]
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
> Other ideas?
Another genetic explanation is that a number of genes are involved, and
if you have lots of them, the effects are bad. (E.g. you go insane, as
just one example).
Cf sickle-cell anaemia in malarial regions. The effect is that, if the
gene frequencies fall too low, selection will increase them, if too
high, will decrease them. (That's supposed to be one possible
explanation for the level of bipolar disorder: there's some genetic
basis for it which increases creativity and originality).
> This speculation is linked to an idea for a possible sequel to
> _Salamander_. Central to that book was a dangerous consequence of
> scientific progress, the science being magery. What if we have progress
> in a different science--genetics? The equivalent of Mendel works out the
> basic principles and starts applying them to magery.
>
> In my world there are lots of different mage talents and they have only
> been well understood for the past fifty years or so. If the genetics is
> complicated, one can easily imagine that all anyone used to know was
> that there was a modest tendency for the children of mages to be
> talented. But once the genetics is worked out ... .
It needn't be easy to work out.
As another genetic explanation, you could have it that the genes for
different talents "interfered" with each other, so someone with fire
mage talents is incompatible with someone with water(?) mage talents,
e.g. the magic "backfires" more often. That could (eventually) lead to
speciation.
For non-genetic explanations, you could go for predators/assassins. I
get the impression you don't want non-human races taking an interest (or
even existing) so you'd need some sort of secret cabal "culling" mages
who seem to be getting too successful/powerful. But I don't like
conspiracy-theory type stories.
Simplest, I think, to assume that magery *is* becoming more commonplace,
but that the evolutionary progress is slow, because it's very
complicated.
Jonathan
--
(I'm seeing a number of replies to things that never showed up on my
newsserver; I guess it's dropping stuff, maybe about 1% at the moment.)
Brian M. Scott
<sp...@bounceswoosh.org> wrote in
<news:slrnevg8p...@home.bounceswoosh.org> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've read many (any?)
> stories where someone of sub-average intelligence has
> great magical abilities.
The closest that I can think of at the moment is Cashel in
David Drake's Isles books. I don't think that he's actually
of sub-average intelligence, but many of the people around
him do. It would be more accurate to say that he's simple,
provided that the word is understood in a positive sense.
And he wields his magic unconsciously; consciously he's
wielding a bloody great staff.
Brian
John W. Kennedy
> R.l. <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
>> Tina Hall wrote:
>
>>> I think the main advantage is at the point in time where the
>>> first humans, way back when the Earth was still flat, got to use
>>> magic, while others had none.
>
>> Before Tolkien bent it? :-)
>
> Ew. No. I wasn't talking about LotR, or whatever else he wrote. I
> don't know how you get that bore into it in the first place.
In Tolkien's universe, the Earth was originally flat. It became round
only by divine fiat when, near the end of the Second Age, the
Numenoreans sailed west to the Undying Lands, foolishly believing that
they would become immortal by so doing. Ever since, only Elven ships
have been able to sail "the straight road"; mortals instead find America.
In his last years, Tolkien seriously considered altering this, along
with his mythical origins for the Sun, Moon, and Venus, but he had not
done enough work on the new version before his death for it to be
incorporated into the final version of the Silmarillion. (It would also
have required a revision of The Lord of the Rings.)
--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"
* TagZilla 0.066 * http://tagzilla.mozdev.org
Julian Flood
> 1.[] IQ correlates with skull size,
> and skull size of infant with death in childbirth of mother.
Only if you control other variables. Size of pelvis of mother relative
to the rest of her body. Overall size of mother. The last makes me
wonder why women are generally smaller than men.
JF
David Friedman
Julian Flood <jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote:
"Correlates with" doesn't mean "correlation coefficient equals 1.0,"
which is how you seem to be reading it.
As you probably know, the problem is a three way constraint: skull size,
pelvis width, length of gestation. To get the baby out you need either a
small skull, a wide pelvis, or short gestation--i.e. relatively
premature birth. Human women have a pelvis that is wider than optimum
for other purposes, gestation that is shorter than optimum for other
purposes, and still have more dangerous deliveries than other
species--all presumably because large skulls are an advantage for the
offspring.
Julian Flood
>
> As you probably know, the problem is a three way constraint: skull size,
> pelvis width, length of gestation. To get the baby out you need either a
> small skull, a wide pelvis, or short gestation--i.e. relatively
> premature birth. Human women have a pelvis that is wider than optimum
> for other purposes, gestation that is shorter than optimum for other
> purposes, and still have more dangerous deliveries than other
> species--all presumably because large skulls are an advantage for the
> offspring.
Yes, but why are women not bigger? That solves all the childbirth problems.
JF
Dan Goodman
> Consider the classic The Marching Morons or the recent similar movie:
> Idiocracy. Even though a trait offers an advantage, it may not be one
> which is sufficient to allow more offspring to reproduce.
Some things "The Marching Morons" gets wrong:
1) Higher-IQ people are not physically inferior (as a group) to
lower-IQ people.
2) Higher-IQ people don't always act and sound middle-class; lower-IQ
people don't always act and sound lower-class.
3) Lower-IQ people don't outbreed higher-IQ people.
4) There's this little thing called "regression to the mean" which
applies to inheritance of IQ.
--
Dan Goodman
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
future http://dangoodman.livejournal.com
Links http://del.icio.us/dsgood
John W. Kennedy
Pelvis-engineering problems?
Actually, the human line of descent has generally been getting bigger
for quite a while. Maybe survival-based selection for larger women just
isn't as strong as sexual-based selection for larger men.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Compact is becoming contract,
Man only earns and pays."
-- Charles Williams. "Bors to Elayne: On the King's Coins"
Tina Hall
> Tina Hall penned:
>> JR Holmes <jrho...@wi.rr.com> wrote:
>>> If you want to draw an analogy between distribution of genius and
>>> the distribution of magic proficiency,
>>
>> The link actually exists in my Magic Earth series. :) The amount of
>> magic someone can handle depends solely on their mental capability.
>> For most people that's average[*], with a few above average, and the
>> very rare genius. The overall average ability has risen within the
>> last 10k years, much like real people's ability to invent and
>> perform ever more complicated things increased.
> Meh. That feels too obvious to me.
Heh. For me, that 'obvious' is a reasonable conclusion.
> Or maybe just unfair. Isn't being super-intelligent enough of a
> bonus?
Who says the world is fair? :) No one gets a contract with the
universe that states they're all treated equally.
But in my setting, the consequences don't double (brains plus magic
skill), rather they are much the same. There's magic for everyone,
after all, so it's nothing special, just like humans are all
supposed to be able to think.
Look at it from the PoV where it is nothing special, rather than as
someone from our world where it would be. You'd have enough magic to
do every day tasks and your job. And you might have a special talent
(similar to our mundane talents; Artists, Healers, Pathfinders[*])
that enables you to work something beyond your actual strength.
And of course, it always matters what you do with it. If it's not
trained, and/or you refuse to use it as best you can, you won't get
anywhere. :) The skill merely determines the physical limits. Much
like hardware&software. (Software = upbringing and training,
hardware = genes.)
[*] Artists can work things or do things to move the heart in either
way within a creative activity, whether that's paintings,
entertainment, or tailoring really well fitting clothes. Healers can
tend sickness or do the equivalent to corrective surgery, or just
run a massage/beautishop. Pathfinders are good at finding new ways
to do new things, mundane and with magic, but they need a basis to
work from. (There are three more, but not as present in this
society.)
Back to the subject, the talents depend on particular combinations
of particular genes (I don't have any table for that, just some
notes on an unfortunate combination of anomalies sparking one of the
not mentioned talents). So you could breed for that. For the skill,
it's as likely as it's here for smart parents to have a dumb child,
or the other way round.
> Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've read many (any?) stories where
> someone of sub-average intelligence has great magical abilities.
Depends on what you define as sub-average mental capability (I don't
use the word 'intelligence'). If you just look at Robert Jordan's
bricks, the whole white tower can't get two braincells between them
to rub together.
Mary K. Kuhner
Julian Flood <jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote:
Selection for age at first reproduction is a possibility. The earlier
you start your growth spurt, the smaller you will end up. It may be
that if females had to grow to the average size of males, their date of
first fertility would be pushed back, and this would reduce their
average reproductive capacity more than the increased size would
improve it.
The average US diet leads to both larger adult size and earlier date of
fertility than most others, suggesting that the tradeoff can be severely
influenced by environment. Maybe we are now selecting for big women.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Bill Swears
develop more in utero, and childbirth would still take place at the
uncomfortable stage where their is risk to both mother and baby.
I'm not taking the stance that it's irresolvable, but that a simple size
change in the woman probably won't solve the issue. I do wonder though,
whether there are any statistics on birthing issues for big women with
small husbands.
Bill
--
Ourdebate.com lifts free debate between writers and dilutes it with ads.
rec.arts.sf.composition is a USENET group, and can be accessed for free.
Ourdebate.com therefore sucks (the life from discourse),
and dribbles (deceit when integrity would have worked just as well).
David Friedman
Julian Flood <jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote:
I don't know, but body size is going to affect reproductive success in
lots of other ways. Most obviously, a larger body requires more food,
and a larger body, intelligence held constant, requires a larger skull,
which gets us back to the childbirth problem.
Gerry Quinn
jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk says...
According to Gray's Anatomy:
"The size of the pelvis varies not only in the two sexes, but also in
different members of the same sex, and does not appear to be influenced
in any way by the height of the individual. Women of short stature, as
a rule, have broad pelves."
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com says...
> In article <45f842be$0$78340$7b0f...@reader.news.newnet.co.uk>,
> Julian Flood <jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > David Friedman wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > As you probably know, the problem is a three way constraint: skull size,
> > > pelvis width, length of gestation. To get the baby out you need either a
> > > small skull, a wide pelvis, or short gestation--i.e. relatively
> > > premature birth. Human women have a pelvis that is wider than optimum
> > > for other purposes, gestation that is shorter than optimum for other
> > > purposes, and still have more dangerous deliveries than other
> > > species--all presumably because large skulls are an advantage for the
> > > offspring.
> >
> > Yes, but why are women not bigger? That solves all the childbirth problems.
>
> I don't know, but body size is going to affect reproductive success in
> lots of other ways. Most obviously, a larger body requires more food,
> and a larger body, intelligence held constant, requires a larger skull,
> which gets us back to the childbirth problem.
That last refers to skull size at birth. Certainly in adulthood the
skull size of women is slightly smaller than that of men, indicating
that there should be some room for maneuvre.
I'd guess that mate competition and such matters have something to do
with the relative size of men and women.
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
sp...@bounceswoosh.org says...
Unless 'It's a GOOD life' counts.
But you're right, and it's an interesting idea. What if there's an
inverse correlation? Powerful mages are dull or even mentally
retarded, and other people compete to control them.
- Gerry Quinn
R.L.
/snip/
> In Tolkien's universe, the Earth was originally flat. It became round
> only by divine fiat when, near the end of the Second Age, the
> Numenoreans sailed west to the Undying Lands, foolishly believing that
> they would become immortal by so doing. Ever since, only Elven ships
> have been able to sail "the straight road"; mortals instead find America.
>
> In his last years, Tolkien seriously considered altering this, along
> with his mythical origins for the Sun, Moon, and Venus, but he had not
> done enough work on the new version before his death for it to be
> incorporated into the final version of the Silmarillion. (It would also
> have required a revision of The Lord of the Rings.)
I haven't read much besides LOTR. Didn't he keep revising things to more
mundane, less interesting?
Hm, as some people say of STAR WARS....
Peter Knutsen
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
I get the impression that you're working from an assumption of binarism.
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
Why don't we get selection in favour of intelligence?
> Several possibilities occurred to me:
>
> 1. The genetic disposition towards magery carries with it some
> biological side effect such as lower fertility.
>
> 2. Young mages often kill themselves in the process of learning to use
> their talent; in my world that is true at least of fire mages.
On Ärth, learning magic is perfectly safe. However, you learn it in
order to use it, and using it is inherently risky, depending on how
skilled you are relative to what you're trying to do.
> 3. The use of magery has negative biological side effects--perhaps it is
> so exhausting that mages are more prone to diseases and accidents than
> other people.
Not on Ärth. If we ignore the so-called "cantrip casters", the common
ones, then the rest of magehood live comfortable lives. Just something
as simple as being able to bathe in near-freezing water, without
discomfort let alone any health risk, is hugely convenient. And it takes
only a little bit more magic to be able to melt ice so you can have your
bath. If you get a wound, you just cast a cleansing spell on it, then
maybe if you can get bothered to you wrap some cloth around it (no need
to worry about sterility). If you can't sleep, you can just use a Light
spell, no need to purchase candles (and thus no need to worry about your
scrolls or books catching fire).
> 4. The use of magery has negative behavioral side effects--negative, of
> course, from the standpoint of reproductive success. Perhaps it is so
> absorbing that mages are unlikely to marry and raise children. Perhaps
Quite possible.
Mages may also be shunned by non-mages. There are parts of Ärth where
that isn't the case, but they're the exception. Elsewhere, mages are
seen as at least slighlty eccentric, even if they are often seen as
useful eccentrics.
Notice what happens to smart women, in terms of dating? Now consider
women with high magic talent. And this is in a setting where you can
just walk to the nearest slave market and buy a cute,
easy-to-get-along-with two-legged pet (of course such pets get pregnant,
but you won't have to fully acknowledge the offspring as yours, although
chances are that most men would be at least somewhat sentimental about it).
> the society is one in which most women would prefer to bear fewer
> children than they do; female mages can and do use their talent to keep
> themselves from getting pregnant.
On Ärth, pregnancy is seen as the natural consequence of liaisons
between men and women. However, if a woman can learn sufficient magic,
she'll have economic freedom so that she won't be forced to marry. Many
such women would marry anyway, out of love, affection or similar, but
they'd marry at a very old age, in their mid 20s (or later!) rather than
in their mid teens. That'll mean fewer children per marriage, on
average, although this may be compensated for due to lower infant
mortality (and safer births).
> 5. Perhaps I am being too quick with my genetic explanation--something
> entirely different might be going on. Suppose there are beings--not
Maybe. You certainly don't have to make your setting the least bit
scientific. In fact, doing so would be contrary to tradition.
> necessarily conscious--which I will call mageons. There are a fixed
> number of them, they are immortal, and they attach themselves to humans
> at birth; a human with a mageon has magical talent. Mageons tend to
> attract each other, so the child of a mage or a mage couple is more
> likely to have a mageon nearby when he is born, giving the illusion that
> magery is heritable.
>
> Other ideas?
>
> This speculation is linked to an idea for a possible sequel to
> _Salamander_. Central to that book was a dangerous consequence of
> scientific progress, the science being magery. What if we have progress
> in a different science--genetics? The equivalent of Mendel works out the
> basic principles and starts applying them to magery.
It sounds like you're quite intersting in having your setting change. I
guess that's a good thing, but it will mean that producing sequels will
probably become more and more difficult.
(Ärth isn't a truly static setting, although it won't change
sginificantly in the short term, meaning a couple of decades).
> In my world there are lots of different mage talents and they have only
> been well understood for the past fifty years or so. If the genetics is
> complicated, one can easily imagine that all anyone used to know was
> that there was a modest tendency for the children of mages to be
> talented. But once the genetics is worked out ... .
>
> There are now interesting possibilities both for selective breeding by a
> government that wants a lot of mages, perhaps for military purposes, and
> for individual mages beginning to engage in mate selection on genetic
> grounds.
Interestingly, statistics show a strong correlation between the
intelligence of married couples. Smart people tend to marry other smart
people. Wouldn't the same be true with magically talented people? It
would true to a lesser extent, since magic talent is less pervasive than
intelligence, in terms of how much and in how many areas it affects a
person's life and hobbies. Or perhaps it would be to a greater extent,
depending on how people use magic.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
David Friedman
Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
...
> Why don't we get selection in favour of intelligence?
Obvious possibilities:
1. It's hard to do. When the genes try to make someone very smart, they
often produce an idiot by mistake.
2. It's expensive. Bigger brains tend to result in bigger skulls which
tend to result in more deaths in childbirth and require more food if
they don't die being born.
3. We have had selection in favor of intelligence; the question is why
we don't have more. Perhaps intelligence has both reproductive
advantages and disadvantages--the obvious example of the latter being
that if you are smart enough you can pursue your own ends instead of
your genes' ends. The advantages might decrease as the fraction of the
population that is intelligent increases--perhaps the niches where
intelligence is useful are all filled. That would give you some
equilibrium level.
...
> Interestingly, statistics show a strong correlation between the
> intelligence of married couples. Smart people tend to marry other smart
> people. Wouldn't the same be true with magically talented people?
Funny you should mention that.
"Shortly after I become most unhappily single, he sends his very
beautiful and very clever daughter to be trained as a mage, thus
providing her with the one qualification that no rival can offer. I have
no doubt that is his plan, and it is clear that she is of the same
opinion. Not a lady to take lightly."
The speaker is a prince, the heir to the throne, the most eligible
bachelor in the kingdom, and a mage.
Monique Y. Mudama
>
> Notice what happens to smart women, in terms of dating?
Um ... I'm smart. What happened to me?
I think I know what you mean, but I've never had problems finding guys
who liked me plenty, and who considered intelligence to be a plus, not
a minus.
> Interestingly, statistics show a strong correlation between the
> intelligence of married couples. Smart people tend to marry other
> smart people. Wouldn't the same be true with magically talented
> people? It would true to a lesser extent, since magic talent is less
> pervasive than intelligence, in terms of how much and in how many
> areas it affects a person's life and hobbies. Or perhaps it would be
> to a greater extent, depending on how people use magic.
I thought I read somewhere that as a couple grows old together, the
higher IQ tends to drop to match the lower one.
--
monique
Monique Y. Mudama
> In article <45ff83ae$0$141$157c...@dreader2.cybercity.dk>, Peter
> Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> Why don't we get selection in favour of intelligence?
>
>
> which tend to result in more deaths in childbirth and require more
> food if they don't die being born.
Is it true that high intelligence necessitates a large brain and a large
skull? I thought it was all in the wrinkles. Certainly I've known
plenty of incredibly smart people, and none of them had a noticably
larger head than the less-smart people I know.
--
monique
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> Notice what happens to smart women, in terms of dating?
They ask out the cute geek boys, who say, "Uhh ... oh, right,
heterosexuality, I have one of those around here somewhere!"?
--
Darkhawk - K. H. A. Nicoll - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
Come, take my body (Allelu--)
Come, take my soul (Take my soul--) "Dark Time"
Come, take me over, I want to be whole. October Project
David Friedman
"Monique Y. Mudama" <sp...@bounceswoosh.org> wrote:
I'm not sure about "necessitate," but my understanding is that there is
a substantial correlation between IQ and skull size. Presumably
intelligence depends on a variety of factors, but that's one of them.
Dan Goodman
Birds have rather more intelligence for the brain-size than mammals do.
However, their brains are rather differently organized; so it's not
something mammals are likely to evolve naturally.
R.L.
> Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
>
>> On 2007-03-20, David Friedman penned:
>>> In article <45ff83ae$0$141$157c...@dreader2.cybercity.dk>, Peter
>>> Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Why don't we get selection in favour of intelligence?
>>>
>>> 2. It's expensive. Bigger brains tend to result in bigger skulls
>>> which tend to result in more deaths in childbirth and require more
>>> food if they don't die being born.
>>
>> Is it true that high intelligence necessitates a large brain and a
>> large skull? I thought it was all in the wrinkles. Certainly I've
>> known plenty of incredibly smart people, and none of them had a
>> noticably larger head than the less-smart people I know.
>
> Birds have rather more intelligence for the brain-size than mammals do.
> However, their brains are rather differently organized; so it's not
> something mammals are likely to evolve naturally.
Hm. But who says the intelligence wetware has to be more or less spherical
in the cranium? Why not have a long and skinny 'brain'?
Perhaps like the stereotypical long-headed advanced aliens. But I'm
thinking more about using the whole spine, perhaps much more of the nervous
system, for information processing and testing of possible actions.
Kinesthetic....
R.L.
Bill Swears
>
> Notice what happens to smart women, in terms of dating?
I dated two smart women in high school, my definition being women who
were smarter than I was. One of them had an attack of common sense and
dropped me after six months, the other showed execrable taste in men,
and moved in with me. We've been housekeeping together for twenty-seven
years, married for twenty-five this July.
I'm not sure where you were going with your comment.
Bill
Gerry Quinn
dsg...@iphouse.com says...
> Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
>
> > On 2007-03-20, David Friedman penned:
> > > In article <45ff83ae$0$141$157c...@dreader2.cybercity.dk>, Peter
> > > Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
> > >
> > >> Why don't we get selection in favour of intelligence?
> > >
> > > 2. It's expensive. Bigger brains tend to result in bigger skulls
> > > which tend to result in more deaths in childbirth and require more
> > > food if they don't die being born.
> >
> > Is it true that high intelligence necessitates a large brain and a
> > large skull? I thought it was all in the wrinkles. Certainly I've
> > known plenty of incredibly smart people, and none of them had a
> > noticably larger head than the less-smart people I know.
>
> Birds have rather more intelligence for the brain-size than mammals do.
> However, their brains are rather differently organized; so it's not
> something mammals are likely to evolve naturally.
Some birds have an interesting trick of growing the part of their brain
that deals with singing in spring, and letting it shrivel away in
winter.
- Gerry Quinn
Crowfoot
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> While discussing the world of _Salamander_ with my daughter Becca, an
> interesting puzzle occurred to us. In that world--and, I think, in many
> fantasy worlds--the ability to do magic is an innate talent, which at
> least suggests that it is genetic. It is moderately rare. It is useful;
> someone with that talent is likely to have a higher income, more status,
> than if he did not have it.
>
> So why don't we get selection in favor of the talent until, by the usual
> Darwinian mechanism, everyone has it?
Not apropos of your particular story, but --
I like the traditional explanation because it's simple and
recognizably human (so assuming one's characters *are*
socially human-like at least, it tends to fit pretty well) and
makes sense in social and psychological terms. Magicians,
being powerful, are (like economically and politically
powerful people) very competitive and inclined to follow
their appetites and whims, which also means that they are
dangerous to the desires of others. So they'll be both
admired feared (which also means hated, as with our
supposed historical witches, and present day shamans
too which is why they tend to work through a veneer of
Christianity in order to assert their devotion to "good").
So not many people choose to pursue a magical talent (or
are permitted by their parents to do so) because the risks
in learning to use it and in using it openly are high, and
even upon maturity mages in conflict tend to weed each
other out at a high rate. Then there's the common idea
of the "mage" as celibate, voluntarily or not, as a
condition of studying or practicing magic (maybe in
part to *prevent* the rise of super-magician children
who would be too powerful for anyone, including their
own parents and peers, to handle).
Again, generalizing from reality, because of his or her
power and the dangers of being near it for ordinary
folks, shamans tend to live apart from their neighbors
and are unlikely to attract mates because of their
isolation and the likelihood of their being attacked by
dangerous energies and opponents.
Even given a magic that "works" because it's a biological
fact of some kind, this constellation of controls strikes
me as a pretty effective means of holding down the
prevalence of mages. Nobody weeds out hunters for
having extra-sharp eyesight, but it's awfully easy for a
successful shaman to be subject to an angry, jealous, or
frightened neighbor's accusation of witchcraft and, at
the very least, chased out of town. I first ran across this
analysis in the work of an anthropologist named
Redfield who studied village life in South America, I
believe. Given human sociology, it seems to me that
even with a real "magic gene" you'd have to explain
why these controls do *not* pertain in order to support
the existence of a preponderance of mages. Stories
about talented mutants tend to be pretty realistic
about this.
Come to think of it, maybe this is about the problem
of magical talent evolving *too quickly*, that is in
stages that create too obvious an advantage to those
with the "gene", rather than so slowly, as with real
evolution, as to go unnoticed until the "better eye" is
just a widespread fact that everybody accepts and
knows how to deal with in socially positive ways.
I've been away a bit, so if this slant has been covered
or is too far off the subject, apologies. I've been set
thinking this way by an article about a new theory that
the major stimulus to human evolution was our low-
level status as prey animals in a world of much bigger,
tougher, better armed predators than ourselves, who
had to survive by their wits, which is being credited
as a force selecting for whatever traits encourage the
social cohesion that affords a prey-group better
protection from stronger predators, and social cohesion
includes workable hierarchies that maximize the
effectiveness of the group more than the rise of extra-
powerful individuals.
Well, it's early -- just waffling on a bit here, putting
off unlovely chores.
SMC
Dorothy J Heydt
Crowfoot <page...@swcp.com> wrote:
>
>So not many people choose to pursue a magical talent (or
>are permitted by their parents to do so) because the risks
>in learning to use it and in using it openly are high, and
>even upon maturity mages in conflict tend to weed each
>other out at a high rate. Then there's the common idea
>of the "mage" as celibate, voluntarily or not, as a
>condition of studying or practicing magic (maybe in
>part to *prevent* the rise of super-magician children
>who would be too powerful for anyone, including their
>own parents and peers, to handle).
This is beginning to sound like the treatment of Sparks in Girl
Genius.
E.g.,
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20061110
and
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/ggmain.cgi?date=20070219
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
John W. Kennedy
> In article <45ff83ae$0$141$157c...@dreader2.cybercity.dk>,
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>
>
>> Why don't we get selection in favour of intelligence?
>
> Obvious possibilities:
>
> 1. It's hard to do. When the genes try to make someone very smart, they
> often produce an idiot by mistake.
>
> 2. It's expensive. Bigger brains tend to result in bigger skulls which
> tend to result in more deaths in childbirth and require more food if
> they don't die being born.
>
> 3. We have had selection in favor of intelligence; the question is why
> we don't have more. Perhaps intelligence has both reproductive
> advantages and disadvantages--the obvious example of the latter being
> that if you are smart enough you can pursue your own ends instead of
> your genes' ends. The advantages might decrease as the fraction of the
> population that is intelligent increases--perhaps the niches where
> intelligence is useful are all filled. That would give you some
> equilibrium level.
4. Who says we don't?
--
John W. Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne
of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts"
-- J. Michael Straczynski. "Babylon 5", "Ceremonies of Light and Dark"
R.L.
/snip/
> Some birds have an interesting trick of growing the part of their brain
> that deals with singing in spring, and letting it shrivel away in
> winter.
Ooh, shiny! That could produce a sort of multiple personality effect; a
musician in spring only. And the memories of spring would be lost in each
annual shirveling ... most of them.
A very melancholy world, that could be.
Jonathan L Cunningham
> Peter Knutsen wrote:
> >
> > Notice what happens to smart women, in terms of dating?
>
> I dated two smart women in high school, my definition being women who
> were smarter than I was. One of them had an attack of common sense and
> dropped me after six months, the other showed execrable taste in men,
> and moved in with me. We've been housekeeping together for twenty-seven
> years, married for twenty-five this July.
What are you going to do when she realises her mistake and moves out?
Jonathan
--
(I'm seeing a number of replies to things that never showed up on my
newsserver; I guess it's dropping stuff, maybe about 1% at the moment.)
Bill Swears
> Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
>
>> Peter Knutsen wrote:
>>> Notice what happens to smart women, in terms of dating?
>> I dated two smart women in high school, my definition being women who
>> were smarter than I was. One of them had an attack of common sense and
>> dropped me after six months, the other showed execrable taste in men,
>> and moved in with me. We've been housekeeping together for twenty-seven
>> years, married for twenty-five this July.
>
> What are you going to do when she realises her mistake and moves out?
>
> Jonathan
>
Gerry Quinn
page...@swcp.com says...
> I like the traditional explanation because it's simple and
> recognizably human (so assuming one's characters *are*
> socially human-like at least, it tends to fit pretty well) and
> makes sense in social and psychological terms. Magicians,
> being powerful, are (like economically and politically
> powerful people) very competitive and inclined to follow
> their appetites and whims, which also means that they are
> dangerous to the desires of others. So they'll be both
> admired feared (which also means hated, as with our
> supposed historical witches, and present day shamans
> too which is why they tend to work through a veneer of
> Christianity in order to assert their devotion to "good").
So why aren't priests feared in the same way? Do the people believe
that the shamans have extra powers that the priests do not, or do they
just trust the priests not to curse the fields?
Faith healers do not normally get run out of town, unless they are
exploitative quacks who everplay their hand. One might hypothesise
that shamans and witches who get run out of town, or worse, tend to be
those who put it about that they are in the cursing, rather than
healing, business.
Now I come to think of it, there's this popular image in fantasy of the
witch as the local 'wise woman', clever with healing herbs etc., who is
suddenly accused of consorting with the devil. But in what proportion
of witch trials did the evidence include reports of powers being used
for good?
- Gerry Quinn
James A. Donald
<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
> Hm. But who says the intelligence wetware has to be
> more or less spherical in the cranium? Why not have a
> long and skinny 'brain'?
Nerves transmit information rather slowly, at about
seven meters per second so one needs an approximately
spherical brain for quick thinking. Also nerves
transmit information at approximately 300 bits per
second maximum, so one needs a lot of nerves, so your
brain cannot in fact be all that skinny. The interior of
the brain is mostly transmission lines, the processing
tends to be mostly done on the surface.
If, using nanotechnology, we can scan an existing brain
and build a simulated brain, we can probably build a
simulated brain that works about a hundred million times
faster, experiencing rather more than a year every
second.
--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/ James A. Donald
John F. Eldredge
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:34:54 -0800, "R.L."
><see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
>> Hm. But who says the intelligence wetware has to be
>> more or less spherical in the cranium? Why not have a
>> long and skinny 'brain'?
>
>Nerves transmit information rather slowly, at about
>seven meters per second so one needs an approximately
>spherical brain for quick thinking. Also nerves
>transmit information at approximately 300 bits per
>second maximum, so one needs a lot of nerves, so your
>brain cannot in fact be all that skinny. The interior of
>the brain is mostly transmission lines, the processing
>tends to be mostly done on the surface.
>
>If, using nanotechnology, we can scan an existing brain
>and build a simulated brain, we can probably build a
>simulated brain that works about a hundred million times
>faster, experiencing rather more than a year every
>second.
One nice touch about the ultrasonic-based group minds that the Tines
had in "A Fire Upon the Deep" was the way that the geometry of the
pack affected how the minds worked. A pack arranged in a straight
line was less intelligent than one arranged more-or-less in a circle,
because of propagation time. If two or more packs got too close
together, the result was a temporarily-mindless mob because the
signals got intermingled.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
Crowfoot
Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
> In article <pagemail-D2D740...@iruka.swcp.com>,
> page...@swcp.com says...
>
> > I like the traditional explanation because it's simple and
> > recognizably human (so assuming one's characters *are*
> > socially human-like at least, it tends to fit pretty well) and
> > makes sense in social and psychological terms. Magicians,
> > being powerful, are (like economically and politically
> > powerful people) very competitive and inclined to follow
> > their appetites and whims, which also means that they are
> > dangerous to the desires of others. So they'll be both
> > admired feared (which also means hated, as with our
> > supposed historical witches, and present day shamans
> > too which is why they tend to work through a veneer of
> > Christianity in order to assert their devotion to "good").
>
> So why aren't priests feared in the same way? Do the people believe
> that the shamans have extra powers that the priests do not, or do they
> just trust the priests not to curse the fields?
Well, pre-Xian priests often *were* shamans, I think, and
were indeed often feared. I think once you have an actual
church hierarchy and rituals, followers feel more secure
because the rules are thought to constrain the priest to a) self-
select for an "obedient" nature rather than a wild and
unpredictable shaman, and b) follow and rely on the church
rules, which are to some degree known to and trusted by the
devout public, particularly when the God the priest serves is
supposedly benign. You ask him for things, and maybe he'll
give 'em to you, maybe not.
With a shaman, the situation is much more unpredictable and
chaotic, and the powers the shaman deals with are themselves
very dangerous and unpredictable; and all that keeps the
shaman from joining the "dark side" is their internal ethical
sense and devotion to the community. There is no hierarchy
keeping them in line. They are rivals with respect to their
reputations, and nobody wants to get in the line of fire when
they get aggressive about it, either. When somebody has
gotten another shaman to curse you, you go to your guy to
have the curse removed; but this means that *your* shaman
can also *cast* curses, and you don't want to upset him/her
and risk becoming a target yourself. Worst of all, your shaman
can go completely to the bad and begin persecuting people
with curses for pay, in which case he becomes a witch, but by
the time you know that this is so, lots of people will have
suffered and died.
Kinda like that, I think.
> Faith healers do not normally get run out of town, unless they are
> exploitative quacks who everplay their hand. One might hypothesise
> that shamans and witches who get run out of town, or worse, tend to be
> those who put it about that they are in the cursing, rather than
> healing, business.
And one would be right. That's exactly how it works.
> Now I come to think of it, there's this popular image in fantasy of the
> witch as the local 'wise woman', clever with healing herbs etc., who is
> suddenly accused of consorting with the devil. But in what proportion
> of witch trials did the evidence include reports of powers being used
> for good?
Probably none; once she was accused, every single thing she
put forward in her own favor would be re-interpreted to
work against her by inquisitors/lawyers/witch-finders trained
in such tactics. If you stepped forward to support the accused,
you would be accused yourself. Not the greatest incentive to
testify to the good a "witch" had done.
SMC
>
> - Gerry Quinn
Jonathan L Cunningham
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:24:47 +1000, James A. Donald
> <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> >Nerves transmit information rather slowly, at about
> >seven meters per second so one needs an approximately
> >spherical brain for quick thinking. Also nerves
> >transmit information at approximately 300 bits per
> >second maximum, so one needs a lot of nerves, so your
> >brain cannot in fact be all that skinny. The interior of
> >the brain is mostly transmission lines, the processing
> >tends to be mostly done on the surface.
> >
> >If, using nanotechnology, we can scan an existing brain
> >and build a simulated brain, we can probably build a
> >simulated brain that works about a hundred million times
> >faster, experiencing rather more than a year every
> >second.
>
> One nice touch about the ultrasonic-based group minds that the Tines
> had in "A Fire Upon the Deep" was the way that the geometry of the
> pack affected how the minds worked. A pack arranged in a straight
> line was less intelligent than one arranged more-or-less in a circle,
> because of propagation time. If two or more packs got too close
> together, the result was a temporarily-mindless mob because the
> signals got intermingled.
Story seed -- this is why people dance. (I'm talking about formal
dances, not individuals jiggling around.) It's to affect the group mind
of the dancers.
ObSF: the computers (City Fathers?) in James Blish's _Cities in Flight_
stories physically moved around to reconfigure themselves. The stories
date back to the era when computers were the size of freezers.
Gerry Quinn
page...@swcp.com says...
> In article <MPG.206c850a1...@news1.eircom.net>,
> Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>
> > In article <pagemail-D2D740...@iruka.swcp.com>,
> > page...@swcp.com says...
> >
> > > I like the traditional explanation because it's simple and
> > > recognizably human (so assuming one's characters *are*
> > > socially human-like at least, it tends to fit pretty well) and
> > > makes sense in social and psychological terms. Magicians,
> > > being powerful, are (like economically and politically
> > > powerful people) very competitive and inclined to follow
> > > their appetites and whims, which also means that they are
> > > dangerous to the desires of others. So they'll be both
> > > admired feared (which also means hated, as with our
> > > supposed historical witches, and present day shamans
> > > too which is why they tend to work through a veneer of
> > > Christianity in order to assert their devotion to "good").
> >
> > So why aren't priests feared in the same way? Do the people believe
> > that the shamans have extra powers that the priests do not, or do they
> > just trust the priests not to curse the fields?
>
> Well, pre-Xian priests often *were* shamans, I think, and
Aside: how does "Xian" differ from (say) "Kike"?
My sympathy for the poor shaman is accordingly lessened. Frankly, he
sounds like a very good candidate for being run out of town, even if
that reduces the interest of the town for visiting anthropologists!
- Gerry Quinn
A.B.
wrote:
> Other ideas?
6. Mages enjoy a higher social status as a result of their scarce
power, thus they engage in union behavior to artificially reduce their
number through concerted malthusianism.
Crowfoot
Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
> In article <pagemail-142763...@iruka.swcp.com>,
> page...@swcp.com says...
> > In article <MPG.206c850a1...@news1.eircom.net>,
> > Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
> >
> > > In article <pagemail-D2D740...@iruka.swcp.com>,
> > > page...@swcp.com says...
> > >
> > > > I like the traditional explanation because it's simple and
> > > > recognizably human (so assuming one's characters *are*
> > > > socially human-like at least, it tends to fit pretty well) and
> > > > makes sense in social and psychological terms. Magicians,
> > > > being powerful, are (like economically and politically
> > > > powerful people) very competitive and inclined to follow
> > > > their appetites and whims, which also means that they are
> > > > dangerous to the desires of others. So they'll be both
> > > > admired feared (which also means hated, as with our
> > > > supposed historical witches, and present day shamans
> > > > too which is why they tend to work through a veneer of
> > > > Christianity in order to assert their devotion to "good").
> > >
> > > So why aren't priests feared in the same way? Do the people believe
> > > that the shamans have extra powers that the priests do not, or do they
> > > just trust the priests not to curse the fields?
> >
> > Well, pre-Xian priests often *were* shamans, I think, and
>
> Aside: how does "Xian" differ from (say) "Kike"?
Do people find "Xian" offensive? I'm old enough to remember
hearing people use the word "Kike" (although I've not recently
seen it in print except as an example of a slur, and haven't
seen or heard it at all in public or private discourse for decades
now). Never heard anyone called "an X-eeyann" either. I
assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
objection to it before.
SMC
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> Do people find "Xian" offensive? I'm old enough to remember
> hearing people use the word "Kike" (although I've not recently
> seen it in print except as an example of a slur, and haven't
> seen or heard it at all in public or private discourse for decades
> now). Never heard anyone called "an X-eeyann" either. I
> assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
> text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
> objection to it before.
No, it's an old substitution; a single chi is easier to write than
chi-rho-iota-sigma-tau-omicron-sigma, as it has no essentially necessary
curvy bits and is reasonably succinct. (Presuming I have the spelling
right on that.) If you go to seminaries, you'll see the theology
students using it all the time (according to the report of a Catholic
M.Div. of my acquaintance).
Some people took the notion that they could parse it as an insult in the
"refusing to refer to Christ" manner -- both Christian and hostile
non-Christians -- because they were too pig-ignorant to know that the X
has been used as a symbol for Christ for ~two thousand years.
Graham Woodland
> In article <MPG.206e06417...@news1.eircom.net>,
> Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>
>> >
>> > Well, pre-Xian priests often *were* shamans, I think, and
>>
>> Aside: how does "Xian" differ from (say) "Kike"?
>
> Do people find "Xian" offensive? I'm old enough to remember
> hearing people use the word "Kike" (although I've not recently
> seen it in print except as an example of a slur, and haven't
> seen or heard it at all in public or private discourse for decades
> now). Never heard anyone called "an X-eeyann" either. I
> assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
> text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
> objection to it before.
>
Christians in my childhood used 'Xmas' as an abbreviation for Christmas as
cheerfully as anyone else, though I imagine the most extremely devout might
have scorned to do so. Indeed, I don't know that any of the people or
institutions who used the form *weren't* primarily Christian; in context,
it would seem exceptionally unlikely.
If indeed the shorthand has acquired a pejorative connotation, I would guess
that it is recent, and probably confined to some fairly obscure
subcultures.
I don't use 'X' for 'Christ' partly for aesthetic reasons, and partly
because of personal idiosyncrasies of no likely interest to the wider
public. I am a rabid agnostic in a largely Christian tradition, with views
that most religious people find it difficult to differentiate from outright
atheism, FWIW.
--
Cheers,
Gray
John W. Kennedy
> Do people find "Xian" offensive?
Well, "Xian" is actually the name of a city in China; the customary
short form of "Christian" is "Xtian", and, to answer your question, only
the most ignorant and depraved among A) fundamentalists and B) the PC
police complain about "Xtian".
> I
> assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
> text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
> objection to it before.
It's far, far older than that. C. S. Lewis uses it in at least one of
his letters.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Give up vows and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like That.
...you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts, and not because
it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong, because it is
violent, and not because it is unjust."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Ball and the Cross"
Irina Rempt
> Do people find "Xian" offensive?
Yes, mildly; it signals, for me, that people are afraid or otherwise
unwilling to spell out "Christ".
Irina
--
Vesta veran, terna puran, farenin. http://www.valdyas.org/irina/
Beghinnen can ick, volherden will' ick, volbringhen sal ick.
http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi Latest: 18-Mar-2007
Brian M. Scott
<ir...@valdyas.org> wrote in
<news:46044616$0$339$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Crowfoot wrote:
>> Do people find "Xian" offensive?
> Yes, mildly; it signals, for me, that people are afraid or otherwise
> unwilling to spell out "Christ".
The basic idea has been around for a long time, and in a
Christian setting, too. 16th century English parish
registers often abbreviate the name <Christopher> to
<Xpofer>. (Presumably the <p> was originally a rho.)
Brian
Irina Rempt
[abbreviating Christ as X]
> The basic idea has been around for a long time, and in a
> Christian setting, too. 16th century English parish
> registers often abbreviate the name <Christopher> to
> <Xpofer>. (Presumably the <p> was originally a rho.)
I know that (not about Xpofer, though; nice!), of course, but still when
someone uses it *now* my experience is that they're usually writing from
an anti-Christian viewpoint. (Also, I'm not in the US, which may make a
difference.) I'm not scandalised, or vehement, or anything; just a pang
of annoyance.
Chris Dollin
> ObSF: the computers (City Fathers?) in James Blish's _Cities in Flight_
> stories physically moved around to reconfigure themselves. The stories
> date back to the era when computers were the size of freezers.
I don't recall any evidence for that first sentence.
--
It's Coincidence! Hedgehog
"We did not have time to find out everything we wanted to know."
- James Blish, /A Clash of Cymbals/
Gerry Quinn
page...@swcp.com says...
> > Aside: how does "Xian" differ from (say) "Kike"?
>
> Do people find "Xian" offensive? I'm old enough to remember
> hearing people use the word "Kike" (although I've not recently
> seen it in print except as an example of a slur, and haven't
> seen or heard it at all in public or private discourse for decades
> now). Never heard anyone called "an X-eeyann" either. I
> assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
> text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
> objection to it before.
I think one needs only to look at the typical context in which it is
used to see that it is derogatory.
Of course it has no intrinsic derogatory meaning, any more than "kike"
or "nigger" do.
As for the "abbreviation" idea, it may apply to text-messages, but is
hardly valid in the usenet contexts where it is most visible.
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
dark...@mindspring.com says...
> Crowfoot <page...@swcp.com> wrote:
> > Do people find "Xian" offensive? I'm old enough to remember
> > hearing people use the word "Kike" (although I've not recently
> > seen it in print except as an example of a slur, and haven't
> > seen or heard it at all in public or private discourse for decades
> > now). Never heard anyone called "an X-eeyann" either. I
> > assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
> > text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
> > objection to it before.
>
> No, it's an old substitution; a single chi is easier to write than
> chi-rho-iota-sigma-tau-omicron-sigma, as it has no essentially necessary
> curvy bits and is reasonably succinct. (Presuming I have the spelling
> right on that.) If you go to seminaries, you'll see the theology
> students using it all the time (according to the report of a Catholic
> M.Div. of my acquaintance).
I don't see Christians using it on usenet.
> Some people took the notion that they could parse it as an insult in the
> "refusing to refer to Christ" manner -- both Christian and hostile
> non-Christians -- because they were too pig-ignorant to know that the X
> has been used as a symbol for Christ for ~two thousand years.
So you admit it is indeed used as an insult, but you refer to those who
perceive this intention as "pig-ignorant"?
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
> Crowfoot wrote:
> > Do people find "Xian" offensive?
>
> Well, "Xian" is actually the name of a city in China; the customary
> short form of "Christian" is "Xtian", and, to answer your question, only
> the most ignorant and depraved among A) fundamentalists and B) the PC
> police complain about "Xtian".
Examples?
> > I
> > assumed "Xian" to be a bit of usenet shorthand grown out of a
> > text-messaging culture, and have never encountered any
> > objection to it before.
>
> It's far, far older than that. C. S. Lewis uses it in at least one of
> his letters.
I doubt whether the current derogatory usage on usenet derives either
from text messaging or C. S. Lewis.
- Gerry Quinn
Julian Flood
>> ObSF: the computers (City Fathers?) in James Blish's _Cities in Flight_
>> stories physically moved around to reconfigure themselves. The stories
>> date back to the era when computers were the size of freezers.
>
> I don't recall any evidence for that first sentence.
Yes, they did. I can't remember which bit it's mentioned in, but I
recall them trundling around.
JF
Brian M. Scott
<jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote in
<news:46052bfb$0$78519$7b0f...@reader.news.newnet.co.uk> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Chris Dollin wrote:
I also have that memory.
Brian