Well, I gotta say, I sympathise with the guest host’s angry rant two minutes in. Incidentally, I’ve encountered Game Theory before, and while the host’s exuberance has a tendency to get on my nerves the ideas themselves are very interesting.
Anyway. I don’t think it sounds “random” or “ridiculous” at all. In fact, I myself have wondered more than once what, if anything, really makes Pokémon different from humans. In terms of evolutionary biology, as the video points out, it’s really quite clear cut: in the same way as all birds are dinosaurs, humans are Pokémon, although we don’t think of them that way. I don’t see any other creatures in the Pokémon world that might be relatives of humans, and Pokémon pretty much run the gamut of eukaryotic life forms, so actually I think you’d need to make some pretty strange assumptions in order to argue that humans aren’t Pokémon. I can think of two (EDIT: THREE) possible scenarios:
1) Humans are the last surviving descendants of a completely separate ‘kingdom’ of life, with fundamentally different cellular biology – the Pokémon world’s equivalent to the Archaea, basically – once as diverse and widespread as Pokémon are today (this would actually be really interesting to run with, and might help provide an explanation for why humans can’t be captured in Pokéballs, or why Pokémon react to things like evolutionary stones while humans don’t, but I don’t see any strong evidence for it).
2) Humans are actually from another planet or an alternate reality and were transplanted into the Pokémon world relatively recently in evolutionary terms (sounds mad, but I have seen commentators and fan fiction authors use this in background).
3) Pokémon themselves are from another world, and were introduced to Pokéarth long ago enough that they have out-competed all other animals and driven them the lot of them to extinction, with humans managing to survive (this seems highly unlikely given the evidence for fossil Pokémon hundreds of millions of years old – I doubt humans have been around all that time).
The rest is trivia – some I agree with, some I don’t; in particular, I would dispute the statement that “the ‘dex ain’t no Wikipedia,” because although I love my Pokémadex, as primary sources go it can be a bit mad – tell me again how Magcargo’s body is hotter than the surface of the sun? The myth stuff, I’m neither here nor there on – the myth about Pokémon shedding their skins to become humans, for example, has a very clear real-word antecedent in the myth of the selkie, so I’m hesitant to ascribe a Pokéverse-specific interpretation to it. Similarly, the notion of a forgotten age when humans, animals and supernatural beings mingled more freely than in the present is common enough in the real world that I believe a similar story could exist in the Pokémon world whether or not it’s actually true. Still, the cumulative effect of these and other myths seems to be that Game Freak want to suggest to us that something is going on. The idea that death itself is a form of evolution (in the Pokémon sense) I find fascinating; something like that would be worth pursuing through fan fiction, because it would have profound implications for how the whole cosmology of the Pokémon universe is put together, and it has a solid grounding in the backstories of Pokémon like Yamask and Spiritomb (assuming we believe them). Lastly, I feel compelled to point out three important faulty assumptions in their biological line of argument: 1) that being a Psychic-type necessarily means a Pokémon is highly intelligent (they come to this conclusion by looking at just one species – Alakazam – when looking at another, like, say, Slowpoke, might prompt the opposite reaction), 2) that, if humans evolved from Pokémon, the most intelligent Pokémon should be the ones that most resemble humans (at best a very self-centred approach to the question), and 3) that the “body style” to which a Pokemon is assigned by the Pokédex is a reliable indicator of evolutionary kinship (which, to be blunt, is simply wrong; juvenile and adult Pokémon very often have different body styles – for instance, Chingling and Venonat both belong to the bipedal-tailless group, which should make them among humanity’s closest relatives… closer, in fact, than Primeape…). Egg group, though, which they also discuss, I am much more willing to buy.
Yes, I did just write a substantial paragraph attacking the logic of a very eloquent expression of a position I actually agree with. Because I’m me; don’t argue.
Pokémaniacal 