Briefing chat: Pokémon turns 30 — how Pikachu and pals inspired generations of researchers

**Benjamin** (0:04)
Hi, listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to The Nature Briefing Podcast, our regular Friday show. Joining me as always is Nick Petrich Howe. Nick, how are you doing today?

**Nick Petrich Howe** (0:12)
I'm doing well, thank you, Ben. Excited to get into it.

**Benjamin** (0:14)
Well, exciting stuff today, because today, the 27th of February, if you're listening to this, the day it goes out, is the 30th anniversary of Pokémon. The original Game Boy game was released back on the 27th of February 1996 And in this show, we're going to take a little look at how Pokémon and science have intersected. And we've got an expert on board to do it with us. Miriam Nadeff, I choose you.

**Miriam Nadeff** (0:40)
Hello, Ben. Great to be on the show. It's my first time in the Friday show.

**Benjamin** (0:44)
Well, it's great to have you with us. Now, we'll say you were in the presence of two Pokémon expert trainers, me and Nick here. But you have been looking a lot at this intersection. Before we get into that, I think I have to know, tell me both, what's your favourite Pokémon? If you say Mr Mime, I'm ending this show right now.

**Miriam Nadeff** (1:00)
No, it's not. My favourite Pokémon is Psyduck. It's the Psyking Duck.

**Nick Petrich Howe** (1:04)
That is an excellent choice. My choice would have to be Charizard, which is a very, very boring choice. But I remember getting the very first shiny Charizard in that starter Pokémon deck that many people will have had. And it's stuck with me since then.

**Benjamin** (1:17)
Nice. Well, people say you never forget your first. And I will go the same. I think Squirtle for me. Pokémon Blue on the original Gameboy. Put a lot of time into that when I was a student, instead of going to lectures. Then my house got burgled and so did the Gameboy. So that's where we kind of left it. Anyway, this crossing over between Pokémon and science is something you've been looking at a lot. And in fact, you were over in Chicago last week, meeting a researcher who said that Pokémon, the pocket monsters, were maybe something that sparked an idea in him about about natural history.

**Miriam Nadeff** (1:44)
That's true. So last week I was in Chicago and I visited the Field Museum there, which is hosting an exhibition for the first time in the US about fossils and Pokémon. And the exhibition will feature some of the Pokémon that were inspired by or based on real animals as well as the real fossils that they were based on. So the curators really hope that people will see how the world of Pokémon and the world of science come in together and how they influenced each other over the years.

**Nick Petrich Howe** (2:12)
And speaking of influences of Pokémon on science and vice versa, being an insect biologist back in the day, I kind of have an idea that Pokémon itself was inspired by collecting insects.

**Miriam Nadeff** (2:25)
That is right. So the creator of the Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri, used to collect insects and tadpoles as a hobby during his childhood. And as Ben said, the franchise started as video games when they included 151 Pokémon. Now there are more than 1000 Pokémon.

**Benjamin** (2:41)
And it seems like that collecting element obviously is central to the games and the trading cards and the cartoons and the movies and all the rest of it. And there are parallels here with taxonomy, right? And classification and essentially organizing things in the tree of life. And academic work has been done to try and make a phylogenetic tree of Pokémon.

**Miriam Nadeff** (3:02)
Yeah, so this was a fun experiment that Matt and Shalumi and his colleagues did in 2012 And they published an article in a Science Humor magazine about their experiment, where they analyzed the evolution relationship of 646 Pokémon. And when they ran the data that they collected from the website and from the game, from the TV series, through an actual phylogenetic software, what they got surprisingly was a realistic looking phylogenetic tree. And according to their analysis, the Pokémon life started in water and Pokémon similar to lampreys and bonifishers were among the earliest to reach their present state.

**Nick Petrich Howe** (3:43)
That is very cool. But that is also something that on the flip side has been somewhat criticized, this evolution of Pokémon, because in the game, you battle the Pokémon together, they gain experience and then they level up and transform into different shapes.

**Miriam Nadeff** (3:56)
Absolutely. So the reason for this, Nick, is because biological evolution happens within populations rather than individuals. And it also takes place over successive generations. Whereas in the Pokémon world, an individual Pokémon transforms suddenly and we see the changes at an individual level. And some people have said that the process could be closer to metamorphosis rather than evolution. But even so, metamorphosis in reality also happens over a very long time, unlike the sudden transformation that we see with the Pokémon characters.