Taxonomy - Blog Posts

w. wait. hold on a second. are. sharks whales????????

Nope! Sharks and whales are VEEERY different. They haven’t shared an ancestor since... well.... since the devonian, I suppose. That was over 450 million years ago!

See, it’s...

Oh, bother. Alright, fine, I’ll do an infographic. It’ll be easier to explain, because there’s a lot of stuff to digest.

Let’s go back in time to.... THE CAMBRIAN!!

Disclaimer: I made this in like an hour while slapping together what I knew about these two animals and decorating it with cute images. It isn’t totally accurate, and I’m simplifying a lot for ease of reading. Please don’t eat me, I’m not a bio major!

Transcript below the cut!

[Transcript start: The image is a simple-looking infographic with a green background and chalk-like white lined drawings of various fish.

The Cambrian Explosion, which took place about 541 million years ago, featured a whole bunch of neat stuff crawling around. This included things like: 

Opabinia - a shrimp-like organism with lots of side-fins and a tuby-like appendage which it used to scoop things into its mouth

Trilobites - the ancestor of arthropods, which we consider ‘bugs’ these days.

Dickinsonia - an organism which looks a lot like a leaf, with a middle section and ray-like parts coming out of it and forming most of its body. 

Andsome of the first fishes - the jawless fish, who were our earliest ancestors. The jawless fish resemble lamprey eels - things which don’t have a moving jaw bone.

During the Devonian period (approximately 490 million years ago), the fish line evolved jaws, which was great for them, because they could now smile winningly. (And eat stuff better.) This was the last common ancestor shared between sharks and whales.

The jawed fish evolved into two groups - one was the cartilaginous fish (or fish which have no bones, only cartilage, except for their teeth) - and the other was bony fish, which had a skeleton. These body fish were technically whale ancestors - because the group eventually evolved the species which first came up on land. These were creatures similar to lungfish, who were able to process oxygen out of water and could move themselves through mud using their flippers.

Meanwhile, the shark ancestors continued their lineage in the oceans and evolved into many more funky shapes, including rays (like stingrays) and skates.

As for the fish on land - they were the ancestors to what we know today as the tetrapods - the things which eventually became the amphibians, lizards, dinosaurs... and mammals! 

One of these mammals was the whale ancestor, which looked quite similar to what we think of as a regular land animal - it had four limbs, and a body plan not dissimilar to dogs, cats, etc. Although it could walk on land, it decided to make an evolutionary U-turn and go back into the water again.

They evolved to be optimized for swimming, and eventually lost their hind limbs. They still needed to breathe air, though, and they are still considered mammals, because they birth and nurse their young! 

This begs the question: If sharks and whales aren’t related to each other that much, why do they look so similar?

That’s a great question! That’s because of something we call Convergent Evolution.

It turns out some shapes just work really well when you’re trying to swim in water. Having fins, flippers, and being fish-shaped just gives you advantage, so many water dwelling creatures end up evolving similar bodyplans - like whales and sharks did.

There’s still a reliable way to tell the two apart, though. Check their tails! See if you can tell the difference.]

are either of these stories good? cause they sound really interesting

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!