Jonathan
After a bit more work, Mage Hager asked Jonathan: “I do know some of your plants. But the similarities are small and extremely difficult to find. I found them in some cases only because my magic said these were of the same species. Other plants from you I do not know at all. How is this possible?”
Jonathan paused for a while to gather his thoughts. Then he answered: “First you must understand one thing. I do not know why at least parts of the plant and animal life seem or are similar to my world. Even assuming your world is identical to my world, only with mana added, this would be extremely unlikely. Hell, even without mana added, this would not be likely. Not impossible, mind you, but unlikely. But assuming there are infinite worlds, there will, because of how infinite works, certainly be infinite worlds where this happened. So having this out of the way, I want to introduce the concept of evolution to you. You almost certainly have used it yourself, or have seen others use it purposefully, without knowing precisely what it is what you are doing. Evolution, in its most basic form, are the natural differences between a parent and its child. For example, we have a blue thing as a parent. To uncomplicate matters, we take something that only needs one parent to reproduce. In our example, the child is differing somehow from its parent. Let’s say, it is red instead of blue. What are the things that could have happened? First off, somewhere in the past, the blue parent thing could have had a red ancestor. The information needed for the red colour could have been dormant. The information I speak of is called DNA, which is short for deoxyribonucleic acid. What exactly this is, I honestly do not know, and the things I do know would be nearly impossible to teach you without a few hours of preparation. Important is that this acid stores all information needed to build one of us. Every human has this acid, this code in them, as well as most, if not all living things. We get from each of our parents part of the code. But it also can be damaged. Most of the time, this damage does not do anything at all. If it does change something, it might be something important, which certainly would be a problem, but not always is. Sometimes it changes something non-vital, like for example eye colour. But that would be a major change, which is pretty unlikely. Did you understand everything until now?”
Heras Hager had a strange notebook before him, in which a ghostly feather wrote things down. He thought for a moment and then answered with a resounding yes.
Jonathan continued: “So the DNA had been damaged, and the change did not kill the affected or was bad for it. So now there are multiple scenarios that can happen. First off, it could be killed or die early in any other way. The mutation dies out, for now. The thing could be to different from the rest of its group or species and does not find a mate. The mutation dies out because it is not propagated through offspring. The thing finds a mate, the mutation propagates and maybe, sometime in the future, every individuum in a population will have this mutation. This is especially likely if the mutation gives the individuum any kind of advantage, but not necessarily so. This is the basis of evolution. But there is another complication that is important to know. Not everything we have written in our DNA is active. And sometimes these dormant parts can be reawakened. This is what most major differences between a child and its parents are. They might have originally formed over a long time and they have been dormant, or they have changed while being dormant because of incremental change. But then there is something else that can happen, and this is important. In my world, and likely in this world, there are natural processes that can rapidly damage large parts of the DNA. You will not survive if it is too much, but if you are lucky, you can survive smaller doses, without changing or developing a dangerous disease. Your children might be changed if that happens. Most likely for the worse, because there is so much that can go wrong, but sometimes for the better or at least in an interesting new way.”
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“If I understood you correctly, every time a crossbred two of the same kind of plant I am trying to create a specific mutation, or am I wrong?”
“Not entirely, but what you are really trying is to get a mutation that is already present in one plant to be present in both plants. Generally, you are trying to mix two specific, already present, characteristics together. One hint for the future: not every information in the DNA behaves the same way. Somewhere I have the information written down, but honestly, I do not know where. Important to know is that some of this information tends to linger and reappear after multiple generations and others disappear easily for basically forever. So back to your original question. It boils down to two things. The first would be a change in natural evolution. The other is selective breeding and maybe a bit of so-called genetic engineering. That is the process of influencing living things to create certain mutations, but here I am also basically at the end of my knowledge.”
“This was a fascinating discussion, thank you for that.”
“I too thank you for being such a good listener. Let’s continue with our work, shall we?”
Heras Hager laughed and answered: “Sure. Could you help me with that bush over there? It is dead and must be torn out. “
“Of course, where is the shovel?”
They continued to work until it was night. T
hen the Mage brought Jonathan back to his room and said goodnight to him. Jonathan showered, noticing that he was really dirty from a day’s work with the plants. The water seemed as if it were black, at least in the beginning. Then he lied down on his bed and was asleep fast.