This question continues: “…*cont* leap over a mountain. Why didn’t natural selection kick humanity’s ass during their development, leaving only Pokémon? What circumstances would lead to humans surviving alongside Pokémon?”
Well, now, that is a difficult one, isn’t it? I’m inclined to suggest that the way to get the answer is to go back to how natural selection and Darwinian evolution actually work. ”Survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean that the biggest, fastest, strongest, or even smartest species survives. It means that the species (or individual) survives whose traits are best suited to make efficient use of the available resources and reproduce. My own country, New Zealand, provides some illustrative examples here. Before its colonisation by the Maori people in about the 12th century AD or so, there were no land mammals in New Zealand – no dogs, no cats, no mustelids, none of that; in short, there were no land-based predators (although there were once giant eagles – some of the stuff in the Lord of the Rings is actually true). What do you think happened to the birds? Well, a great many of them, over the course of millions of years, lost the ability to fly. Flight is expensive in terms of energy consumption, hugely so. If you don’t need to fly, then that energy is better put to use having more babies. Evolution dislikes waste intensely, and this can cause it to do things that often seem counterintuitive to us. Primates, including humans, are among the most intelligent animals in the world, have excellent colour vision, and like all mammals can maintain a constant body temperature in the face of fairly significant environmental change – and we pay for those things dearly; we’re forced to rely on relatively large amounts of high-energy foods like meat and fruits while slower, stupider animals can just sit and munch on leaves all day. Consider Pokémon, then, who have a myriad of abilities that must be every bit as costly as flight or great intelligence, from a metabolic perspective. They must have a very high energy diet to sustain those powers. I don’t know what’s in those berries, exactly, but I suspect it’s got a lot more of a kick than the standard fructose/sucrose mix you find in fruits like apples. An entire Pokémon ecosystem has a number of specialised organisms – powerful Grass Pokémon, for instance – who help to cycle energy around and increase the efficiency of the whole thing by accelerating growth and decay, but we’re still looking at a world populated by organisms who consume and use a fundamentally ridiculous amount of cellular energy on a daily basis. Now, to an organism whose energy requirements are relatively frugal by comparison, this looks like a very attractive environment – sure, predators and competitors are both very dangerous and powerful, but you can live for a week on the equivalent of a bunch of grapes and half a banana, and you can easily outbreed them. Humans, I think, found a niche for themselves within that context by doing something slightly different, based on taking interspecies cooperation (something we see a lot of in the Pokémon world, even in nature) to a whole new level of organisation and complexity, which they can do because of pretty much the same things that got us ahead in the real world – namely intelligence and complex languages.
We could probably go on at this for a while, but I think that’s enough for today.
Pokémaniacal 