(Here’s the link)

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.

Let’s take an example.  Squirtle can pronounce two syllables: “squirt” and “tle.”  He can vary pitch and inflection to convey questions, exclamations, commands and so forth, but in terms of constructing indicative statements he seems to be limited to those two sounds, which means that he’s basically speaking in binary.  What’s more, 90% of what he says is just alternating those two syllables – he tends to say “squirtle squirtle” over and over rather than mixing it up the way Bulbasaur or Pikachu do (which is why I’m talking about Squirtle – when I talk about Pikachu people have an annoying tendency to worm around with the different combinations of syllables he uses, and how he has a unique utterance for Ash – pikapi – as though there could possibly be some way this had escaped my attention).  We know from Island of the Giant Pokémon that those two syllables are sufficient for him to express dissatisfaction, contentment, cynicism, humour, mockery, familiarity, uncertainty and disdain… and to comment on the weather.  If those two syllables are really all he has to work with, the range of states of mind he manages to convey over the course of that story is linguistically impossible.  Clearly there is some other component to the way he’s communicating that we aren’t capable of picking up on, but damned if I know what it is (shifts in pitch and inflection too subtle for a human ear to interpret reliably?  Body language?  Pheromones?  Some combination?).  That episode’s useful as a case study for a lot of questions because of the subtitle thing, but it’s hardly the only time we see Pokémon having conversations, and you can usually at least guess what they’re talking about (see, for instance, the scene between Bulbasaur and Pikachu in Bulbasaur’s Mysterious Garden) – they’re far from being dumb animals, and they can express their concerns to each other with, apparently, a fair degree of eloquence, in spite of possessing a minuscule lexicon.

The biggest issue for me here is that I just don’t believe there’s a whole lot we know for sure about Pokémon reproductive biology.  You can see what I have to say about that in this article here – and while I would be the first to admit that a lot of what I say in that piece is a little bit ‘out there,’ I think it does demonstrate fairly well that this is a tricky topic at the best of times (since the time of writing, we’ve also been slapped with the random NPC in Coumarine City who says that Pokémon eggs aren’t eggs at all, which is such a bizarre out-of-context statement that there’s little you can do with it, but could easily be Game Freak saying “yeah, whatever you think you know about this stuff is wrong”).  What this all boils down to is that I’m not sure whether Pokémon would be capable of desiring humans in that sense, or even whether they would necessarily have the requisite… er… bits… with which to act on it (even Humanshape species).

Having said that, let’s talk about this anyway for the sake of argument.  Inter-species breeding is certainly common among Pokémon, and in the real world humans often get different animals to breed and produce hybrid offspring like mules or ligers.  This kind of thing even happens without human instigation from time to time.  And then you have that… regrettable incident with the chimpanzee and the frog (a union which is not going to produce offspring no matter how you slice it)… Anyway.  I think the main reason we get upset when humans indulge in such activities (aside from the straightforward visceral revulsion – or, to put it in everyday terms, “eww!”) is that it’s just kind of an abusive action at its base level, because the animal probably doesn’t fully understand what’s going on and in many or most cases wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if it did – which on ethical grounds puts us in a similar position to sexual relations with children (again, eww).  If the Pokémon is the instigator, which I suppose could happen, then maybe there’s a mitigating factor there, but I don’t think you can get away from the fact that a trainer/Pokémon relationship is not entirely equal; I think most people in the Pokémon world would probably agree that the trainer is in a position of power or authority here.  A lot of Pokémon respect and look up to their trainers and habitually seek their approval; that’s really not a healthy starting point.  I believe the most appropriate real-world analogy would be a teacher/student relationship – sure, sometimes the student comes onto the teacher, but that doesn’t make it okay!  The proper response is to say no, firmly, and get the student transferred to another class (i.e. trade the Pokémon, because as well as you might work together, no good can come of that $#!t).  Alternatively, since a lot of Humanshape species are Psychic-types, people might easily suspect a reversal – I think that if such a relationship were ever publicly known, allegations of untoward Hypnosis or similar psychic manipulation would fly fast and thick, possibly ending with the institutionalisation of both trainer and Pokémon.

In sum: I actually don’t believe this would be common, and honestly I’m not certain it could happen at all, but if it did there are still serious ethical issues involved and the best course for the trainer is to avoid such entanglement at all costs because, really, letting something like that happen is not good for either partner, and although it might not have quite the same stigma as bestiality in the real world, I strongly doubt it would be received well (because, again, eww).

I suppose the simple answer would be that I’d aim at least initially for a degree of professionalism – trainers always have expectations of their Pokémon, so it’s only reasonable that the Pokémon should be able to expect certain courtesies, services and assistance in return – with the caveat that any professional relationship is smoother if it’s also friendly.  I think my answer to this question has a lot that would interest you.

Now, as for what Pokémon “call” their trainers – bearing in mind that we don’t actually understand how they communicate, since they just don’t have enough phonemes for all the concepts they obviously understand, that’s tricky.  For a variety of reasons, I don’t believe Pokémon understand or have any use for the concept of personal names, so actually I think all Pokémon likely refer to their trainers as something like “human,” “master,” or “friend” (and yes, I know about the episode with the subtitles, and I know Pikachu has a specific sound for Ash – translation is a bit more complicated than that, even when going between two human languages).  You do raise an interesting point, though – different species will have different needs in this relationship and will react differently to trainers – even the anime tends to put this down to variations in individual personality, as do the fans, but differences in the psychology of entire species must be important too.  Lucario, I think, are supposed to be solitary by nature – a highly social Pokémon like Mightyena, famed for teamwork, will almost certainly need a great deal more micromanagement in training and more interaction with other Pokémon to maintain a balanced emotional state, while a Lucario might be happy being left to meditate for hours on end.  To take an extreme example, Kangaskhan, a Pokémon evolved for a very high degree of investment in her young, might come to view a (comparatively) small and frail human as a family member in need of maternal protection, and consequently be uncomfortable letting her trainer out of her sight for an extended period.  And then there are Pokémon that are just plain inscrutable, like Starmie or Sigilyph – even a very skilled trainer might have trouble figuring out what kind of relationship makes them happy.

This is sort of getting close to trying to construct an evolutionary history of the Pokémon world, which is something I said I would never try to do because trying to work that $#!t out in the real world where we have thousands of prehistoric species to compare is complicated enough (did you know that the closest living relative of the elephant is a small hamster-like creature called a hyrax?), and I am not an evolutionary biologist.  But hey, what the hell?

It’s entirely possible that the whole thing is just convergent evolution – that is to say, Meganium and Tropius, despite their common appearance, are actually no more closely related to Aurorus than they are to Pikachu; they just happen to have adapted in similar ways to similar stimuli.  If you believe that Pokémon type is a reliable indicator of evolutionary lineage (which I don’t, but just for the sake of argument) then this makes a great deal of sense, because the modern sauropod Pokémon are Grass-types, while Aurorus is an Ice-type.  I’m not totally sold on this because I’m not sure I can think of any real-world examples of convergent evolution that are so striking, but it’s possible that the internal biology of these species is radically different and they just happen to look similar…

Anyway.  There’s no reason, ultimately, why large reptiles necessarily have to precede large mammals and die out before mammals can become dominant.  There’s nothing that makes one inherently superior to the other, which is the thing people tend to forget about evolution; it’s not about general superiority, it’s about suitability to particular conditions.  Things just happened to turn out that way in our world, because there was a meteor, and lots of pain, and I think the phrase “global firestorms” has been thrown about, which is never a fun time, and as a result all the largest animals died out very suddenly and all their niches became open all at once, which is a recipe for major adaptive radiation on the part of the smaller animals.  People weren’t totally sure for a while what caused the KT extinction but I think most paeleontologists tend to agree now that the ten-kilometre-wide hunk of flaming rock certainly didn’t help.  It’s possible that the Pokémon world just didn’t experience KT, or didn’t react to it in the same way.  If we believe the events of the first Mystery Dungeon games, Rayquaza (who may well be immortal) has both the power and the inclination to prevent apocalyptic meteor strikes, and while I tend to take Mystery Dungeon with a grain of salt it is worth remembering that there are, and probably always have been, godlike powers at work in the Pokémon world.  I would hypothesise that in some parts of the world the ‘saurian’ Pokémon lineages died out in a much more peaceful and gradual fashion (which let’s face it, many dinosaur lineages were beginning to do in the real world anyway, long before KT) and were replaced by large mammalian Pokémon, while in other areas they continued to flourish, adapt and evolve, creating two or more radically different ecological spheres, which were only recently brought together again by humans in a sort of Columbian Exchange-type fashion.  Think Australia, but with surviving dinosaurs instead of marsupials.  I’d say that’s my best guess.

The problem is that I have no idea what he means.  When he says they “aren’t really eggs,” presumably he is contrasting them to something else which he does consider an egg, but whether or not other egg-laying creatures even exist in the Pokémon world is something of a point of contention.  That being the case, the only thing I can think of that could be considered an egg by whatever definition he’s using is a human egg – which is so completely and obviously different that the statement is just totally banal.  What’s more, describing an egg as being “like a cradle” would be a perfectly straightforward metaphor anyway, so it’s hard to see why being “like a cradle” should somehow disqualify them from being eggs… unless he’s saying that they are “like cradles” in the sense that they are artificially constructed and have viviparous infants deposited in them after birth, but that seems just too weird to contemplate…

Hrm… I’ve thought about this before and failed to come up with any satisfactory answer.  This isn’t a problem specific to Pokémon, of course – almost any combat-centred RPG has to introduce progressively more difficult opponents in order to keep the game interesting, and while most players are willing to suspend disbelief for something so clearly necessary to the functioning of the game, it’s still nice to have an explanation.  However, this is easier for some games to produce than others, simply depending on the nature of the story being told and the world in which it takes place, and Pokémon definitely has more to justify than most.

I think the most obvious possibility is that you encounter more powerful Pokémon later in the game because stronger Pokémon become willing to challenge you as you get stronger (so we imagine that the strange level distributions are actually an illusion of sorts) but that doesn’t explain why you still find weak Pokémon when you go back to earlier areas.  The weird thing is, NPCs in the games actually do acknowledge this pattern sometimes – for instance, if you try to head east from Santalune City towards Snowbelle City right at the beginning of the game, you’re stopped near the entrance to Victory Road and told that you aren’t ready for the kind of opponents you’ll find that way.  It seems, at least at times, like the inhabitants of this world are well aware that some parts of their regions are much more dangerous than others for no readily obvious reason.  I think what this has to suggest is that the skewed level distributions we see are very real, and that they can deal with it.  Pokémon are not, in any real sense, in conflict with humanity as a group, so I doubt that towns in even the most high-level areas are in constant or unmanageable danger – you’d want to be careful walking around outside town without protection, obviously, but we’ve always received the same warnings about even the most benevolent areas at the beginning of each game.  As for new trainers, it seems likely to me that a trainer’s career can start in a number of ways, and that in places with tougher wild Pokémon it’s more common to practice with and then inherit a fairly powerful starter a little later in life rather than be given a low-level one right off the bat (think about it – the trainer classes that represent prepubescent children like Youngsters, Lasses and Bug Catchers tend to hang out in the earlier areas of the game; trainers in higher-levelled areas tend to be older as well as stronger).  Basically, their surroundings do present difficulties for Pokémon training as a career and an institution, but they manage to get around it.  None of this, unfortunately, explains why some areas have higher-level Pokémon in the first place…

Eh.  Well, this is… difficult.  We see Pikachu’s vocalisations (and those of Ash’s other Pokémon) translated as ‘Ash’ in one or two places (all I can think of, actually, is Island of the Giant Pokémon, but there might be others that I’m not aware of or not remembering) but we don’t know what he’s literally saying.  Like, Pikachu really can’t make a wide enough range of sounds that he can realistically produce Pikachu-ese equivalents to any given human name; that’s simply impossible.  I tend to believe that when Pokémon speak they rely a lot on body language and a variety of other species-specific non-verbal cues to convey information, since they clearly understand a lot more than they’re capable of expressing through words, but nonetheless, we don’t actually know how close those subtitles are to the exact meaning of what is going through Pikachu’s head.  The word he uses for Ash (pikapi) could easily mean something like ‘my trainer’ or ‘my master’ or even ‘blue jacket human’ to him, and simply be translated for us as ‘Ash.’  Furthermore, it would be assuming a lot to think that the English word ‘master’ would have the same connotations for Pokémon as it does for us.

Side note: I actually don’t believe that Pokémon understand or have any use for the concept of personal names, which is why I’m skeptical about the subtitles being a totally faithful rendition.  They’re perfectly capable of learning and responding to their own nicknames, but I don’t think that they (well, most species anyway) have any equivalent to the concept.

It’s more than that, though.  In Gold and Silver, Professor Elm is tremendously excited to hear that Mr. Pokémon is claiming to have a Pokémon egg, because at that point (and there is dialogue elsewhere in the game that confirms this explicitly) no-one even knows for sure that Pokémon hatch from eggs.  Why would anyone be concerned to hide that from a child?

EDIT: Actually, come to think of it, even when you think about the day-care people producing lines like “we don’t know how [the egg] got there, but your Pokémon had it” that’s still bizarre, because why would anyone be uncomfortable telling a child “your Pokémon laid an egg”?  There’s no need at all to mention the sex which presumably preceded it.  Seriously, eggs are, like, the most kid-friendly method of reproduction ever.