2017

Male robins fighting over territory

Robins and Evolution for Kids

[This post was posted in March of 2017, before John & Colleen Marzluff and I created Crow Scientist, the free app that teaches kids how to observe real-life crow behavior.]

Now that spring has come to the northern latitudes, here in Seattle the robins are back in the parks. Robins are easy to observe so they provide a good opportunity to talk to kids about how behavior and natural selection play out. Here are science notes for kids, worded simply and arranged roughly from the most basic for the younger kids to the more advanced for older kids. These notes teach a core evolutionary concept, that individuals within a species compete with each other to have healthier and more numerous offspring.

Brighter Robins Are Male, Plainer Robins Are Female

The robins you see easily are males. They have bright red feathers on their chests, and they spend a lot of time out in the wide open. You can sometimes spot females, too, but they have duller breast feathers, and they don’t put themselves on display the way males do. Males also tend to be somewhat larger than females. Male robins are like roosters, and female robins are like hens. 

Male Robins Fight for Land

Robins need to gather food for their children, so each male fights to have a bigger plot of land. You often see two male robins out on a field or big yard, each keeping his distance from the other. When two robins face off and neither one backs down, they fly at each other and turn around each other in a sort of whirlwind. It’s easy to spot male robins facing off against each other because they stand out in the open. If they notice that you’re watching them, however, they might stop fighting, so be sneaky.  

Female Robins Choose Males with Good Land, Good Feathers, and Good Songs

When a female chooses a male with brighter feathers and a stronger song, that male is probably healthier than average. When she picks a male with a larger area of land, she probably gets more food for her chicks. If her mate is healthier and her chicks have more food, then her chicks are more likely to be strong and to survive. 

Most Chicks Die

A robin mother might hatch a dozen hatchlings in one summer, and most of them die before winter.   

Robins Fight Because They Can’t Cooperate

Robins don’t have language, laws, money, or other tools that humans use to divide up resources. That’s why robins are stuck fighting. Fighting takes lots of time and energy, and it’s dangerous, but it’s the only way a male robin can claim enough land to get a mate. Male robins don’t help each other, work together, or make friends with each other. 

Robins Don’t Know What They’re Doing

Male robins don’t know why they’re fighting. When they see another male’s red chest, they just feel like fighting. Female robins don’t know why they choose males with lots of land, bright feathers, or strong voices. They just feel like making that choice. Humans are driven by feelings, too, but we can reflect on our own behavior and even make explicit agreements with others about what we will do or won’t.  

This lesson is a big one because it’s easy for humans to project human-like thinking onto animals, or even machines.  

Testosterone Drives Male Competition

Hormones are chemicals that animals’ bodies make that affect how they grow, feel, or act. Testosterone is a hormone that affects how robin chicks develop in the egg. One effect of testosterone is to organize the male chick’s brain for fighting. When the chick grows into an adult and the breeding season starts, the male chick’s body creates more testosterone, driving it to fight the other males. Testosterone is a type of hormone called a steroid.

“Testosterone for Amateurs”, the basics about this much-talked-about hormone.

Cock robins at peace, a 10-second video of newly returned male robins hanging out peacefully. 

Bonus Science Humor

Robins are a type of thrush, and the genus name for thrushes is Turdus (Latin for thrush).

Crows in the Park
Once you learn the call of a hungry juvenile crow, it’s easy to spot crows families. With any luck, you'll see the the juvenile beating its wings and the parents feeding it.

Games for Humanist Families

Clades, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, 
Cheeky Monkey, King of New York, Dixit

The games pictured here are the ones I took to the first meeting of the “humanist family game club” at my Unitarian church. The idea behind the game club is to give humanist families a fun way to hang out together. As a game designer and a father, I have spent years thinking about games that are great to play with kids and grownups together. Here are my descriptions of these games, which I recommend for humanist families.

Dixit by Jean-Louis Roubira

This charming game involves looking carefully at the detailed, dreamlike, full-color images on the game cards, so it has plenty of appeal from the start. One player gives a clue about a card they secretly chose from their hand. Then each other player secretly chooses a card from their own hands that more or less matches the clue. These cards get turned up, and only the clue-giver knows which one is the “real” card. Everyone tries to guess which card is the clue-giver’s, and players all score points based on how the guesses turned out. The real trick is that the clue-giver gets points only if at least one player successfully guesses the card and at least one player fails to guess their card. If the clue is too clear or too vague, the clue-giver loses the round. Kids have a hard time hitting the right balance between clarity and opacity, so they can struggle as the clue-giver. Little kids do well on a “team” with a grownup. Most of the game, however, is guessing others’ cards, and little kids can have fun doing that. Playing Dixit, whether giving a clue or trying to follow one, is a sophisticated use of our ability to communicate. For kids, it’s an enjoyable way to practice thinking “what did they mean by what they said that?” As for its humanist qualities, Dixit is all about understanding other people’s stories—and often misunderstanding them.

King of New York by Richard Garfield

This action-oriented game is the only violent game on this list, and it’s the most rules heavy. I recommend it because it handles battles in a way that is smart for play balance and good for avoiding hurt feelings. It’s true that the players control monsters that fight over who is the “king of New York”, but the system works such that you never choose which player you attack. Everyone attacks the monster that’s in Manhattan, except for the monster in Manhattan, who attacks everyone else. Play is straightforward: you roll a bunch of special dice, and reroll any dice whose results you don’t like. After up to two rerolls, you use the final results to determine how your monster fights other monsters, heals its wounds, smashes buildings, fights the military, gains energy for special powers, or gains fame. Kids who don’t really know the game can play by feel, and even if they don’t win their monsters will smash buildings, fight other monsters, and step on tanks like the big kids’ monsters do. Educational bit: The map shows the five boroughs of New York so you can show them to kids. One downside: A monster can sometimes get knocked out of the fight and the player out of the game. Usually, however, a player wins by amassing 20 fame points, not by defeating all the other monsters. 

Cheeky Monkey by Reiner Knizia

In this simple but engaging game, players pull animal tokens out of a bag. You can stop after taking a few tokens, or you can take more, but if you pull an animal that duplicates one you’ve already pulled this turn, all the animals you pulled this turn go back in the bag. A press-your-luck mechanic like this is great for kids because they can make real tactical decisions by feel, deciding whether to play it safe or to take risks and living with the consequences. If you have to put all those tokens back in the bag, it’s because you pulled one too many tokens, not because another player messed with you. A few additional rules involve stealing tokens, allowing for player interaction. In addition to being a fun game, Cheeky Monkey features hyenas, walruses, and other distinctive animals from around the world, with science notes about their habits and habitats. 

Chicken Cha Cha Cha by Klaus Zoch

In this German game, you move your chicken around a track, using concentration-style memory play to control movement. Kids are famously good at memory tasks, so it’s a great multigenerational game. The pictures are fun and colorful, mostly animals and eggs. The game includes an aggressive element in that you are trying to steal the tail feathers of all the other chickens, but the circular track prevents players from simply picking on whichever other player they like. Most of the action is memory play and moving around the track. 

Clades and Clades: Prehistoric by Yours Truly

In addition to teaching kids about evolution, Clades has a lot going for it as a game for kids and grownups. Physically, the game involves looking at lots of cute pictures of animals, something that even little kids enjoy. Everyone plays all the time, so kids never have to wait their turn. It’s easy to make the game simpler for beginners, and it’s easy to handicap. Plus, of course, it’s about evolution and science. A middle school science teacher I know says that the game elicits deep questions from students. Clades: Prehistoric is the same game, but with dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other extinct animals. Order here from Atlas Games or ask for it from you friendly local game store.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

Why Games for Humanist Families?

Games are great ways to let kids see humanism in action. For one thing, we humanists turn to other humans for our meaning in life, not to a spirit or an afterlife. Your experience playing a game results from a live interaction shared with other people and with no fore-ordained conclusion. That’s a genuine interaction in a way that seeing a movie together is not. Engaging with other humans for an evening also sends the implicit message that human relationships are worth investing in, a message that adults pick up as well as children. Second, playing games is good for social development. On one level, it teaches basics such as fairness and being a good sport. On a more fundamental level, games teach children to see human interaction as a social construct. Society is like a game, with rules, penalties, winners, and losers. We agree to interact with each other by the rules, but ultimately the rules are up to us, and we can change them to make things better. For example, if we play a game “fairly” and by the rules, some people have built-in advantages that give them an outsize chance of winning. Older kids, for example, do better at Dixit than younger ones. Is that fair? If not, can we change the rules to make the game more even? Whatever the answer, that’s good humanist thinking. 

Kids’ Games and Clades: earlier post on noncommercial games for kids