For all my peeps who like wordlbuilding. Let's talk about cross cultural convergent evolution of ideas.

[RepresentingWrath]

Rememeber how you heard that everything turns into crabs? Carcinisation (American English: carcinization) is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last common ancestor of those groups.

What is this cross cultural thingy? Well, do you know how there were various pagan religions before? And despite not coming into contact at all, or barely contacting each other, they had similar stuff in them like end of days? Another example, some kind of vampire is present in a lot of beliefs. It is not exclusive to religion, but I'm too lazy to search for other examples, and I think you all got the concept. So the point of the thread is, do you use it? Maybe different fantasy races come to the same scientific conclusions, or their religions are similar. Or maybe you completely abolished this concept, and made everything different. Heck, maybe one or two of your characters study this stuff. Share your opinions, thoughts, and experience with this.

 

[owotrucked]

Yes. Gotta follow the meta and always make up an imaginary heaven and hell for after life

 

[MatchaChocolate69]

All human beings derive from a more or less small group of individuals that gradually expanded throughout the world, but at the origin of our species, when we started to communicate, tropes were created that we still inherit today. As Kojima would say, "Memes are the DNA of the soul." Even though these cultures lived apart and differently from each other, the stories and ideas, or at least their foundations, that we pass down are the same from the beginning. An example of this is the Great Flood, which is present in practically all cultures.

Regarding the question in the thread, I'm not sure if it's on topic, but I like to use cyclicality in my novels. Certain events are destined to repeat over time, and the characters realize that certain things have already happened. They have reminiscences of them and, depending on the situation, try to change the outcome. A soft loop, very soft though.

So in the past, certain empires formed, and in the future, they will tend to reform in a similar way. An example of this is the lore of Star Wars before the Old Republic.

In my worldbuilding, regarding religion, there is usually a Pantheon of deities. Various cultures may worship the same deity in different ways, or one may see the said deity as benevolent and the other as malevolent.

I think I got off track, sorry Sensei.

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

Rememeber how you heard that everything turns into crabs? Carcinisation (American English: carcinization) is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last common ancestor of those groups.

What is this cross cultural thingy? Well, do you know how there were various pagan religions before? And despite not coming into contact at all, or barely contacting each other, they had similar stuff in them like end of days? Another example, some kind of vampire is present in a lot of beliefs. It is not exclusive to religion, but I'm too lazy to search for other examples, and I think you all got the concept. So the point of the thread is, do you use it? Maybe different fantasy races come to the same scientific conclusions, or their religions are similar. Or maybe you completely abolished this concept, and made everything different. Heck, maybe one or two of your characters study this stuff. Share your opinions, thoughts, and experience with this.

The wheel was invented multiple times. Rice was doscovered multiple times too. Meanwhile, metal working and even the wheel remained unknown to Mesoamerican cultures.

Concurrent evolution exists, but it is not a necessity.

 

[CarburetorThompson]

That’s a lot of big words

 

[BouncyCactus]

I do use this quite a bit in some of my projects, and I think it is really fun to see how each cultures/regions of my world interact with one central/core idea and evolve from it. Most of them do share a similar trend but with some slight differences too.

One of them is the reverence of the Brightest One/Last Star of the Night/Herald of the Sun. It is simply the North Star+Venus. It is the brightest star of the night, one that is ever-present, from dusk to dawn, and even shin for a bit as the sun roses. It acted as the navigational anchor point of most of the races/culture groups. That one star always has some place among the numerous early religious and later, scientific and cultural importance. It is in fact one of the first universal icons of the world, used by travelers of all races.

Another one is the numerous wyrns, or false dragons, of my world. Some of them are reptilian, some are avian, and some are mammal or aquatic. All they have in common where that they used to be, for a long time, confused to be kin of the now-extinct True Dragon. All of the Wyrns species shared some characteristics that, if the legend is to be trusted, only belonged to a True Dragon. That includes their general body shape/biology, destructive power, and behavior.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

That’s a lot of big words

 

[Deleted member 84247]

I have used it. I think it's interesting if you have a scientific civilization and a magic civilization in the same story, yet they invent the same thing using different means. The closest thing I have to that in stories is in Sleeping Giant where each civilization uses their own magics, but they still end up with cities and other similar things.

 

[LilRora]

I think you're underestimating how connected the old cultures might have been. Migrations, merchants, and some other factors can easily explain a lot of similarities in cultures, especially over the long periods of time we're talking about here.

Otherwise, this is a really cool thing. My favorite is how various more primitive cultures interpret solar eclipses, and how often it's got to do with divine retribution or eating the Sun by some gargantuan entity.

It's primarily caused by circumstances and environment though, so as a worldbuilder you can calibrate various conditions to make convergent evolution likely or unlikely. A cool example is balancing magic with science - if you make science vastly more available and powerful than magic, your societies will naturally go in that direction. If magic is more versatile and readily available, they'll gravitate towards the arcane. But, by making them similarly accessible and similarly powerful in the broad scope, you're giving opportunities to go either way. Then there's the matter of what can be achieved by each - and there's another opportunity for convergent evolution.

When I write, I personally focus on the exact opposite, so how the world, or the culture, or something else could have developed in different conditions, or just if some things went differently, despite being very similar to our own. This is how most of the societies in my stories come about.

There is a related thing I've thought about a ton, particularly when I was into power fantasy. My conclusion was that perfection doesn't exist. To explain it very roughly, the idea is that, you start from the simplest possible building blocks (may be particles, or something even smaller that makes them up). From there, as you progress, complexity arises, which allows for better properties, development, improves survival or usefulness. However, once you reach a certain level, you can no longer compensate for the vulnerabilities caused by complexity, and to improve, you need to simplify your subject, making them more and more versatile, universal, foolproof, approaching the theoretical perfection, which is a singular indivisible thing that serves the purpose perfectly.

Basically, it's that as you approach perfection, everything becomes similar to each other. Although convergent evolution is significantly different since it's about what's optimal at the moment, not what's perfect or even what's optimal in the long term, a lot of similar concept may apply to both of those.

 

[Lloyd]

God's design

 

[Prince_Azmiran_Myrian]

The wheel was invented multiple times. Rice was doscovered multiple times too. Meanwhile, metal working and even the wheel remained unknown to Mesoamerican cultures.

This is false, both metalworking and the wheel were known, but not widely used from what limited knowledge we know of those peoples.

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

This is false, both metalworking and the wheel were known, but not widely used from what limited knowledge we know of those peoples.

So they had bronze and iron?

 

[Deleted member 84247]

It's my Vampy Mommy Goddess's Entelligent design tbh. ?

 

[Prince_Azmiran_Myrian]

So they had bronze and iron?

not to my knowledge, but that isn't what you had stated earlier.

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

not to my knowledge, but that isn't what you had stated earlier.

I stated metalworking and the wheel. They used no wheeled vehicles. And rarely anything that qualified as metalworking proper. You can work on gold, silver and copper even when cold and unheated. You don't need advanced smelting. You don't need metallurgy. If you set a low definition bar, then, yes, they had metalworking. But by the same way, you can back date the invention of "steel" by a few thousand years.

 

[BearlyAlive]

Let's game theory on this one. Your civilizations only have limited different resources, let's say stone, wood, and rope-like vines. With those resources, there's only a limited number of useful things you can create, those useful things are then used to develop new resources, tools, and combinations of those. Rinse and repeat. The useful stuff is kept, and the useless or too innovative stuff is discarded.

Going by those pre-established facts those civilizations most likely have the same base desires and fears, which they use their resources and tools to either satiate or conquer those desires and fears in the most feasible ways. So domesticated animals and plants for food, wheels to transport food and stuff, fire, houses for shelter. Up to those points, pretty much every civilization is more or less the same. If those base desires are covered and threats are actively being dealt with, then this is the point where civilizations start to divide themselves, either by external factors like location, neighbor relations, recurring threats, or by internal factors like religion, state form, or internal conflict.

Unless you throw in some wenches that force those civs to alternatives, the most optimal solutions would always find themselves in similar ways since both starting points and base instincts are the same.

 

[Prince_Azmiran_Myrian]

I stated metalworking and the wheel. They used no wheeled vehicles. And rarely anything that qualified as metalworking proper. You can work on gold, silver and copper even when cold and unheated. You don't need advanced smelting. You don't need metallurgy. If you set a low definition bar, then, yes, they had metalworking. But by the same way, you can back date the invention of "steel" by a few thousand years.

I'm not going to derail the thread further.
I was simply trying to correct the initial incorrect statements.

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

I'm not going to derail the thread further.

There is a Mesoamerican civilisation that started to develop bronze.

 

[owotrucked]

It's my Vampy Mommy Goddess's Entelligent design tbh. ?

Help me: how do I justify cultural convergence towards liking big tiddies?

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

I'm not going to derail the thread further.
I was simply trying to correct the initial incorrect statements.

With further incorrect statements?