Teaching evolution with Pokemon

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture to high school students in Okinawa, describing the fundamental concepts behind evolution. The talk was part of the Okinawa Science Mentoring Program (OSMP). First-year grad students at OIST organise the OSMP, where they mentor high school students and give them a glimpse into the life of a graduate student. OSMP has been pretty popular both amongst the students at OIST and schools in Okinawa.

I was asked to give a lecture, and I decided to talk about evolution. At first, I thought I’d talk about why we study evolution, but then realised that it’s better to present something easily relatable and easily retained by the students given limited time. So I decided to use a quintessential example of evolution encountered by almost all kids in Japan, Pokemon!

I used Eevee and its multiple evolutions as an example of lineage diversification due to selection for different adaptations. The example in the figure shows Leafeon, a grass Pokemon. I described how adaptation to a forest environment might have favoured leaf-like characters, which eventually transformed the furry brown ancestral Eevee into a green, well camouflaged forest-dwelling Leafeon. The best part was an interactive session where the high school students came up with their scenarios to describe the evolution of the other Eevee forms. There were some genuinely ingenious and unique scenarios.
All in all, this was an excellent experience! Can’t wait to give this lecture again next year!