2016

Clades Card Preview

Squamates, by Karen Lewis

Karen recently updated the card face for Clades, the secret game we’re working on, and here’s what they look like. With this nice look, I’m getting excited about this game. For years I was stumped by the question of how to do an evolution game. Now I have one.

All my life I have loved biology, but I never learned what a clade was until I started studying evolution to write Grandmother Fish. Now that I know what a clade is, I’m so excited about the idea that I created a game about it. A clade is any complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. In other words, it is an ancestral population plus all the descendants of that population. “Mammal” is a clade because all mammals descend from an early mammalian population, and no other animals do. The category “reptile” is not a clade because birds descend from the same early reptiles that lizards and crocodiles descend from. Since “reptile” doesn’t include birds, it doesn’t include all the descendants of those early reptiles and can’t be a clade. Biologists have reclassified living things along cladistic lines, putting birds with reptiles in the “sauropsid” group (meaning “lizard-face”).

The top card shown is the clade Squamata (“scaly”). Squamates are lizards and snakes. The card also shows four smaller clades: the chameleon clade, the snake clade, the gecko clade, and the Toxicofera clade (including snakes and chameleons but not geckos). In turn, the Squamata clade shown on this card is part of the sauropsid clade with birds, turtles, and crocodiles. The bottom card is the clade Whippomorpha, which includes whales, dolphins, and hippos. The whippomorphs are part of a major mammal clade including deer, pigs, horses, carnivores, and most large land animals.

Whippomorphs,  by Karen Lewis

Since the concept of the clade is based on common descent, clades demonstrate that evolution has happened. The only reason that scientists can read the genomes of different organisms and classify them together in clades is that different species evolved from common ancestors. When we say that hippos are closely related to whales, we don’t mean that they’re alike. We mean that their common ancestor lived not too long ago, maybe 50 million years ago in this case. In the 1700s, Linnaeus classified organisms according to their traits, such as whether they have scales. Today, we classify organisms according to their evolutionary family history.

The clades concept helped me create an evolution-themed game that kids and grownups can both play. For years I’ve mused about how one could create an evolution-themed game that didn’t compromise on the science. The big problem, as Richard Garfield has observed, is that games are about players planning to reach a goal, which is the opposite of evolution. By its nature, evolution defies the default structure of a game. Another problem is that you “win” evolution by reproducing. Computer games can model reproduction easily, but that’s hard to do with a tabletop game. One year when the Burning Man theme was evolution, I ran mate-choice simulations using playing cards, but we couldn’t do successive generations because there’s no easy way to represent reproduction. And that’s where I was stuck. Thanks to my research on Grandmother Fish, I learned about clades. That gave me a new angle from which to approach the problem of how to do an evolution-themed game, and I’m gratified to have finally designed one. Happily, this game is all about Karen’s cute, little pictures of animals, which are on all the cards. 

As with Grandmother Fish, it’s exciting to be on the side of scientific literacy, especially evolutionary science. Scientific literacy has been on the rise for the last century, and that may have contributed to the rise in IQs. Science is so well-proven that even the opponents of science, such as creationists, pretend to be scientists. Evolution in particular is a great topic to be working with because it’s a scientific topic that people respond to emotionally. Some people hate it, but others respond warmly to it. It’s about who we are, and I bet that’s why it matters to people. 

No more details yet. Just wanted to offer a peek at the cards and rave about clades. The plan is to run a Kickstarter later this year. Stay tuned. 

Clades in Grandmother Fish: post from last August.

More on clades: The Berkeley site Understanding Evolution has some nice explanations of clades free online. I also worked on the Wikipedia page.