Pikachu from Pokémon (Image CC BY-SA 2.0: Farley Santos / https://flic.kr/p/rB3RyM)
The Pokémon GO phenomenon could have positive effects on society. It might improve public health by getting people to exercise while walking around trying to catch virtual monsters in the real world, for example.
But the game could also have a negative effect on science education, by causing confusion over how evolution works.
In most Pokémon games, 'evolution' occurs when a monster turns into a more powerful creature. The process is triggered in several ways, like reaching a certain level of combat experience or exposure to a magic stone -- Bulbasaur becomes Ivysaur at level 16, for instance, while Pikachu 'evolves' into Raichu with a Thunder stone.
Transformation of Pokémon is completely different from evolution in nature, the most common interpretation of the word 'evolution' (Wikipedia defaults to biological evolution, for instance -- not a disambiguation page).
So what does 'evolution' mean?
The word originates from the Latin for 'unrolling' and according to one definition, it's "The process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the Earth." Neither is a good explanation.
There are many reasons why some people don't understand evolution, such as not realizing that all the features of living species are adaptations to their past environments -- not the present world we see today.
One of the most common myths is that evolution happens to individuals, when in fact it's the change to a population over time.
The easiest way to understand this is to think about your family. If you were to take a snapshot of everyone alive today, that photo might include your parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren. But take a picture from a few generations in the past and it would only have grandparents and your ancestors. It's the family -- the population -- that evolves, not individuals.
Focusing on species at a single point in time, rather than seeing a group with ever-changing membership, is what leads people to make mistakes like thinking humans 'evolved from' monkeys. That's like saying you evolved from your cousin, when you only have common ancestors -- your grandparents. Similarly, humans and monkeys (distinct primate groups) shared a common ancestor 25 million years ago.
Pichu, Pikachu and Raichu from Pokemon (Image: Nintendo / The Pokemon Company)
Pokémon's problem is that it perpetuates the misconception that evolution is a process that happens to individuals.
Calling Pokémon transformations 'evolution' also creates confusion for the game franchise itself. Each of the 700+ monsters is called a distinct 'species' and those related by transformation are members of an 'evolution family' -- even though 'evolving' can simply mean an individual has leveled up -- in other words, grown older.
In biology, change to an individual over time is known as development. That isn't the ideal word to use for Pokémon, however, because it doesn't sound very exciting (compared to evolution) and doesn't capture the fact that changes to a monster are dramatic and relatively sudden.
A better alternative is to use an existing word people already understand: metamorphosis, a change in shape. Using 'metamorphosis' rather than evolution makes naming clearer.
Different kinds of monsters in an 'evolution family' would be members of the same species instead, while each monster would be a 'morph'. The 'chu' (mouse) species would have three different morphs, for example: Pichu, Pikachu and Raichu.
Using 'evolution' to describe a transformation is so well-established in Pokémon that renaming the process to 'metamorphosis' is obviously wishful thinking. And that's a shame, because continuing to use the wrong word will damage the public's understanding of how life evolves.
