I can’t say I have seen it before, but I like it. I’m actually not totally convinced by their arguments, but I approve of what they’re doing here, not just for being the same kind of thing as what I do, but for providing an example of “let’s look at the evidence for evolution!” for their viewers, which I can only regard as a positive thing. Their analysis of the different types of bird Pokémon is also admirably creative and consistent. Having said that…
I actually think it’s pretty clear from a number of Pokédex entries that Game Freak assume something like Darwinian evolution is happening in the Pokémon world – the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the entries for Kabutops, which make statements like “It was apparently evolving from being a water dweller to living on land as evident from changes in its gills and legs,“ and ”It is thought that this Pokémon came onto land because its prey adapted to life on land.“ For that matter, the mere fact of the existence of fossil Pokémon is telling – in the 19th century, the rapid advancement of palaeontology was one of the major contributing factors to the development of evolutionary theory since, if species can become extinct, there must be some way of replacing them.
However, I don’t think that this, or any of the evidence Game Theory presents, necessarily proves Darwinian evolution – that is, descent with modification mediated by natural selection. True, that’s one possible explanation, and I would be very surprised if natural selection had no influence on the Pokémon world, but a lot of the evidence we’ve seen could also be consistent with Lamarckian evolution. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a biologist of the same era as Charles Darwin, believed that evolution was driven by the inheritance of acquired characteristics – that is, that traits an organism develops during its own lifetime can be passed to its offspring (work out, and your kids will have bigger muscles, basically). And the thing is, we actually know that this is true for Pokémon, because they can inherit TM moves. Again, I’m sure natural selection does play a part, but I also think there’s more to it (incidentally, even in the real world, where we’ve known that natural selection is the main driver of evolution for a long time, modern understanding of epigenetics is starting to indicate that Lamarck may actually have had a point too).
The other thing that I can’t let pass is Mew, because I actually think that the Pokédex and its in-universe authors are just plain wrong about her, for reasons that I don’t think anyone else has picked up on. Mew is thought to be the common ancestor of all Pokémon, because she possesses the complete genetic codes of every known species (this being the reason for her supreme versatility) – but under modern evolutionary theory this is not something we should expect a common ancestor to have. Think about it. In the real world, evolutionary theory predicts the existence of a common ancestor of all life, way back in the Precambrian eon – an incredibly basic single-celled being that can’t even be called a ‘bacterium’ because it’s even less complex than that. The traits on which natural selection operates are not assumed to exist from the beginning; they arise over time from random mutations. Mew expects us to believe that not one new biological trait has ever arisen in the history of the evolution of Pokémon. If anything, her existence is a strong argument against Darwinian evolution in the Pokémon world.
Pokémaniacal 