Evolution has been a heavily debated topic in the religious community since the idea was suggested by Charles Darwin in 1859. Many people have argued that there’s no way it could exist, we nor any animal could be the bi-product of mere chance. This debate found its way into Americas public schools as the system began to teach this. Many parents fought back against it, writing complaints about teachers overstepping their bounds against religious freedoms.
So people in America don’t like the concept of evolution, what’s the big deal? There are a lot of scientific ideas that people deject, this isn’t a news flash. But where this becomes interesting is just how far some people went to reject any extension of the idea of evolution. In relation to the popular video game series Pokémon, many members of the religious community spoke against the game because of the way the pokemon evolve. In the game, after reaching a certain level a pokemon will “evolve” into a new, better form of itself. Interestingly enough, this is more like a metamorphosis. In real life, one animal doesn’t just turn into another instantaneously and we call it evolution. What pokemon do is very similar to what happens with a butterfly, they start out life as a lower form and eventually become a bigger creature. In fact, in the game there is a pokemon called “Butterfree” that starts its life as a worm, goes through a metamorphosis and becomes a butterfly.
But since they decided to call this process evolution in the series, many people took offense to it. One group that decided to come to the aid of Nintendo in this issue was actually the Vatican, this article from 2000 tells the story of how Pope John Paul 2 gave Pokémon his blessing because he said that it was a “story of strong friendship” and not a game that promoted satanic themes.
So then, if Pokémon really is based on science, what sort of patterns are we able to follow through their lives? Well one real scientific trait in the games is a concept called “shiny pokemon”. Essentially, some of the pokemon in the game have a recessive gene and when they breed to make a new pokemon, that baby can turn out to be a shiny. A shiny is just a pokemon that has a different color. This is similar to recessive genes in real life, like how two parents with black hair are able to give birth to a kid with red hair.
Another fascinating evolution is one that a pokemon called Eevee does. For this section I am getting inspiration from here because I didn’t think about this particular pokemon at first. Eevee is able to evolve into 7 different pokemon, and while this seems like something that doesn’t happen in real life, it actually is. This is called a phenotype, and after doing some reading through this study here, I think the easiest way to describe this is that animals metamorphose into forms that best suit them in their environment. So a grasshopper will have a different skin color depending on if it’s living in a brown prairie or a green forest. This is similar to what is happening in the game, except there the trainer gets to pick what it will become. So next time you’re playing Pokémon, don’t forget to think about how totally relatable it is to the real world!
