Darwin Day: A Holiday for Us

A good evolution book
available used for under $10

Evolution is a powerful idea for us secular folks. Back in 2013, when I would tell people that I had a plan for a children’s book on evolution, their eyes would light up. Their reflexive enthusiasm told me that I should take my book to Kickstarter, and the following year Karen and I raised over $30,000 for Grandmother Fish. Secular adults like seeing evolution as a kids’ book because it is our origin story. There are few things that secular people have in common, and evolution is one of those things. Secular people don’t want to rally around a flag or recite a creed, but evolution is an origin story that includes everyone. It’s universal, not parochial. Karen and I knew that parents would like Grandmother Fish, and once the book was published we could see that kids love it, too. Kids love animals, they love families, and they love seeing where they fit in the family of animals. The power of evolutionary thinking, especially for kids, means that Darwin Day has a lot of potential for exciting the imagination. I’d love to see Darwin Day celebrations catch on around the world. 

Those of us who are enthusiastic about evolution are lucky in that our “patron saint”, Charles Darwin, was someone worth emulating. Darwin was already a famous, widely read naturalist before he proposed the theory of natural selection. As a scientist, he observed closely and wrote cogently. He had found through experience that he was more likely to forget a fact if it was a fact he didn’t like. After noticing this pattern, he made special note of facts that he didn’t like. Darwin’s encounters with people from far and wide showed him that people are more alike than different, and his critics thought that his theory made him irrationally soft-hearted toward “primitive” people. We could use more people like Charles Darwin.

Darwin Day works great as a kid-friendly celebration. Kids love animals, especially dinosaurs, and the connection to evolution is clear. Bringing kids to a Darwin Day event makes sense in evolutionary terms. The relationship between parents and children is central to natural selection. Evolution is about whose DNA gets spread into the upcoming generations, and parental care has been central to the success of mammals, not to mention birds, scorpions, lobsters, wasps, and octopuses. By bringing a kid to the event, you’re parenting, or, if it’s someone else’s kid, alloparenting. Most of the activities I have run are for kids, such as the Charles Darwin Dance, but some are for adults. 

Darwin Day traditions, I propose, should include buying evolution-themed books for children, teachers, schools, or libraries. May I recommend Evolution: The Story of Life by Douglas Palmer? It’s a big, weighty book full of color illustrations, and you can get it used for under $10, including shipping within the US. For little kids, this book has tons of illustrations with countless unusual creatures. For older kids, it has lots of handy science information. It helped me with Grandmother Fish, with Clades, and especially with Clades Prehistoric. For adults, the book is a monumental reminder of mortality. In spread after spread, you see animals that were successful in their day but that went extinct long ago. If instead of a book you want to give an evolution game, that works for me, too. 

I hope you can find a Darwin Day event near you. Here in Seattle we’re lucky to have a kid-friendly Darwin Day celebration on February 9th, with The Reptile Guy to put on a show that sounds amazing. If you don’t have a Darwin Day celebration in your area, maybe talk to some people about starting one next year. 

Seattle’s Darwin Day, hosted by Seattle Atheist/Agnostics

Saturday, February 9, 2019

2:00 to 6:00, show starts at 3:00

The 2100 Building

2100 24th Ave S, Seattle, WA

Donations warmly accepted. 

My evolution activities for kids and adults, including the Charles Darwin Dance. 

http://www.grandmotherfish.com/resources/

Speech at March for Science Seattle

Here’s the 4-minute speech I gave at the March for Science in Seattle, Earth Day 2017, April 22. That’s Karen up on stage with me, wearing a coral reef on her head. It was an honor to speak and a joy to march.

My topic is how evidence can unite us all. My book, Grandmother Fish, gives children evidence for evolution when they wiggle like a fish and hoot like an ape. Kids love learning that humans are part of the great family of animals. Evidence also says that humans are all one family, as Charles Darwin concluded. Evidence can unite the human family because it allows people to share ideas across cultural boundaries.

“Can you wiggle?”

Karen and I are available for artist and author visits, either together or independently. Contact us here: http://www.grandmotherfish.com/contact/

For what it’s worth, here are the notes I used when giving the speech.

evidence together
grandmother fish
earliest fish with jaws
over 400 Mya
200 million greats
3 years
evidence
Grandmother Fish
evidence for little kids
wiggle like a fish—earliest fish
crawl & breathe early reptiles
squeak & cuddle early mammals
grab & hoot early apes
walk & talk early humans
kids love: animals, family, animal family
“I am a HUUMAN”
family of life
humanity one big family
Charles Darwin knew—evidence
evidence says: all related
evidence bring us together
Chinese translation of Grandmother Fish—language, culture, political system, economic system
Not like me: English, Seattle, Mary Oliver, Unitarian
everyone’s story
we are all related
a vision of who were are that we can all share

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day

A song about natural selection by
cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo

Happy Darwin Day! Today I’m running a bunch of activities at Seattle’s Darwin Day celebration, noon to 3 in Bellevue. To coordinate with the organizer, I made a list of evolution activities that I’m ready to run, and here it is. I’ve done most of these activities at school visits or other events, but a few are untried. 

Grandmother Fish

The book is a starting point for discussions about evolution and about the history of life on earth.

Wiggle-Along: A read-along of the book, with five kids in front demonstrating the sounds and motions of each Grandmother. Everyone follows along. Great for kids getting their wiggles out. If you’re not familiar with the book, you can see an early draft being read to kids for the first time in this video, which we originally did for the Kickstarter campaign in 2014. 

Timeline exercises: The five kid volunteers are part of a visual demonstration of how much time has passed since each of the Grandmothers, compared to each other, compared to Earth’s history, and compared to the existence of the universe. You can print full-size images for the five “grandmothers” to hold, available here. 

The story of my book: For kids who dream about being authors someday, the story of how I wrote Grandmother Fish is partly inspirational and partly a caution. It took me many years to figure out how to do the book, and I needed help from many friends to get it right. You can do great things, but it can take a long time, and you need to learn to accept help. 

Q&A: There’s a ton of science behind Grandmother Fish that is not obvious on the surface, so if kids have questions, I have answers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game
This is my animal-matching card game of evolutionary relationships. A “clade” is a complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. For example, “birds” composed a clade, and reptiles and birds together form a larger clade called Sauropsida. Up to 8 kids can play at once, but they’d have to all squeeze around a shared play area. This game is suited to an activity center, sort of like a craft session but for a game instead of a craft. People can drop into and out of games. The game is also a “conversation starter” for evolutionary history, as represented by the animals on the cards. Clades is illustrated by Karen Lewis, the same wonderful children’s artist who illustrated Grandmother Fish.

Kids’ Songs and Dances

We humans all evolved from people who sang and danced around the campfire all night. This stuff is fun for kids, and when kids dance, it’s an excuse for grownups to have fun, too. 

“Charles Darwin” dance: The hokey-pokey meets evolution, where kids evolve from fish into humans one body part at a time. Here a link to the lyrics. They start like this, and you get the idea. 

     “You put your right fin in, 

     You take your right fin out,

     You put your right fin in,

     And derive an arm right out…”

“If You’re Disgusted and You Know It”: A lot like “If You’re Happy and You Know It” but with universal facial expressions and sounds for key emotions: happy (smiling), sad (weeping), scared (scared face), disgusted (yuck face), and surprised (“oh” face).

“Five Violet Spiders”: A familiar tune gets original lyrics and a video by cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo. The song demonstrates natural selection, as the most visible spiders get eaten.

Link to video

Stand Up Interactive Activities

These activities require people to stand up and move around. 

Bloodlines: Roll giant dice to simulate the identification of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam in deep time. Little kids can do it, although it involves probably going extinct.

Mates: Mate-choosing simulations with cards. We simulate monogamy, mixed polygamy, and total polygamy. Kids can do it, but that might be weird. 

Life-on-Earth Timeline: This activity follows the Grandmother Fish reading. It could also be cut loose as its own activity. 

Walk-and-Talk

Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If your favorite dinosaur is a Triceratops or other herbivorer, move left. If your favorite dinosaur is a Tyrannosaur or other predator, move right.” Everybody moves and then gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. Opinionated people on either side can explain their choices. Periodically we stop and discuss, and then move on to new questions. The questions cover evolution questions that people can answer personally, such as favorite extinct animal, experience with evolution while growing up or in school, mammals versus birds, personal experiences (hunting, foraging, cooking, having children). It’s something of a mixer. 

Kahoot! Quizzes

These are two short online quizzes with my original questions and creative-commons images. They cover big ideas, not trivia. For each question, one option is a silly answer, so kids who can’t actually answer the questions can still play along by spotting the silly answers. I use each question as a way to put some aspect of evolution into a greater context, showing how this information fits into the larger picture. These quizzes are on the Kahoot! site, which allows people to answer questions on their phones and participate in the quiz all at once. The quizzes are free for the public to use. 

Wings Quiz: 12 questions on wings, which was the theme of Seattle’s Darwin Day this year. You can also listen to a 15-minute audio of my practicing running the quiz. You can see how I pull in evolutionary concepts and use the questions as starting points. 

Link to quiz    Link to audio

Evolution Quiz: 10 questions on evolution, Charles Darwin, and life on Earth. These are big ideas, like what Darwin thought of “savages”, not trivia, like what years Origin of Species was published. 

Link to quiz

Poetry Reading: “The Sea” by Mary Oliver

This poem is about a woman yearning to return to the fishy life of her ancestors. It’s so good I memorized it to recite at Burning Man one year. Evolution isn’t just about what happened in the past. It’s also about how we feel today, knowing that we are connected to all living things.

Link to poem    

There’s only time for me to do a fraction of these activities at Darwin Day today, but I hope to do the rest someday.

2016

Great-Great-200-Million-Times-Great Grandmother Fish

Great Great Grandmothers of Deep Time

How long is 400 million years? How do you get a child to understand that Grandmother Fish lived 400 million years ago? Honestly, that span of time is beyond the comprehension of an adult, let alone a child. So here’s a thought experiment to help little minds and big one appreciate the mind-boggling span of time between the first jawed fish and us. How long would it take you to say Grandmother Fish’s name if you said it out in full with all the “greats” that she deserves? It’s been 200 million generations since Grandmother Fish was alive, so she is our great grandmother with 200 million “greats”. If you said two “greats” per second, it would take you three years to say her full name.

Kids can understand what three years means. They might have siblings that are three years older or younger. They might remember how little they were three years ago, and they might imagine how old they will be in three years. It’s still a long time for a little mind, but it is comprehensible in a way that 400 million years is not. If you really want to drive this home with a kid, have them imagine that somewhere there’s another kid who is just now starting to say Grandmother Fish’s name with all the greats. Then for the next three years, occasionally remind your child that this imaginary kid is still saying Grandmother Fish’s name without a break. Poor kid. You can see why I call her just “Grandmother” Fish. Then three years after you first mentioned it, tell your now-older child that the imaginary kid has finally finished saying Grandmother Fish’s name.

The other value of this exercise is that it drives home an astounding fact. If you went back in time 400 million years and found the earliest jawed fish, they would be the direct-line ancestors of every human on the planet. They would literally be your flesh-and-blood ancestors, your family. The fish you found would also be the ancestors of all land vertebrates, not to mention nearly all fish. What a difference 200 million generations can make!

Here are all five Grandmothers, the number of “greats” in their names, and how long it would take to say the name out lout (at two “greats” per second). These figures are based on estimates from The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, a book that helped me greatly as I worked on Grandmother Fish.

• Grandmother Fish, the earliest jawed fish. 200 million greats. 3 years.
• Grandmother Reptile, the earliest amniotes. 170 million greats. 2.5 years.
• Grandmother Mammal, the earliest eutherians. 120 million greats. 2 years.
• Grandmother Ape, the earliest apes. 1 million greats. 6 days.
• Grandmother Human, the earliest behaviorally modern humans. 4,000 greats. 80 minutes.

The time it takes to say a name corresponds to the number of generations that have passed, not the number of years. Apes have a slower life cycle than our earlier ancestors, so the number of “greats” in Grandmother Ape’s name is relatively small compared to the 30 million years since she lived. 

And if a kid gets excited and wants to try saying one of these names out loud, let them try. See how far they get.

Kids and Grandmother Fish

Kids loved even this early draft of  Grandmother Fish.

Macmillan is picking up Grandmother Fish for a second edition in September, and Karen and I are ecstatic. We’ll reach a lot more kids, and we won’t have to do the packaging, shipping, and marketing. This deal is really quite a milestone for us, and it’s a joy to bring the miraculous story of evolution to lots of little kids. Last year at this time, I was really excited by the response that the book had gotten from parents and educators. Now I’m even more excited because I’ve seen and heard how children respond to Grandmother Fish. 

Before finishing the book, we had lots of people read sketchy versions to children, and the results seemed promising. We even saw the “light go on” when a girl, having the story read to her by her mother, saw Grandmother Human and realized that the story was about her. The only test that counts, however, is when parents are reading the finished book to their children. Now that we have self-published the book, we have heard from plenty of parents about how kids in their own homes respond to it, now complete with all of Karen’s lovely art. The verdict? Kids love Grandmother Fish. Lots of parents tell me that this book is their children’s favorite book, or even that their kids want the story read to them every night. 

A professional editor said she was surprised that both her 3-year old and her 6-year old loved it. One 4-year old has memorized the book and now “reads” it to his dad, something he’s never done with any other book. 

For an older girl, it’s the first book she was motivated to read (actually read) by herself. 

One 2-year old delights in telling people “I AM A HUMAN!” She belts out that phrase at the store or over the phone—wherever she finds a listener. 

A 4-year old reportedly asked his parents, “What do you think we’ll evolve into?” His dad told me that the question made his heart and his wife’s heart “sing a little.” 

One father, an author I greatly respect, sent me a video of his little girl struggling to read the “cuddle” page. Then, in a heart-melting comment, she says she wants to put the book in her “beauty drawer,” where she keeps beautiful things forever. 

A blogger and mother of two boys with autism says Grandmother Fish is great for her kids. 

Lots of parents also tell me that kids love studying the phylogenetic tree in the back, a great feature that Karen encouraged me to add to the book. 

It’s been tremendously gratifying to hear all these stories. As near as I can tell, the book really seems to connect to kids. Wiggling like a fish is a lot of fun, but I think what really appeals is that the story grounds the child in the family of living things. When a 2-year old announces to strangers “I AM A HUMAN,” she’s saying “I see where I fit in.” I would say that reaching kids this way is a dream come true, but honestly I never dreamed that children would respond so deeply to Grandmother Fish. Karen and I can’t wait until the second edition releases in September. Then we’ll all really see what the reaction is like. 

2015

The amniote clade split into countless smaller clades.

Clades in Grandmother Fish

Last week the printer shipped me two of the first finished copies of Grandmother Fish, which I raised money for last year on Kickstarter. There’s a lot I can say about Grandmother Fish: the 15 years I’ve been working on it; the help I got from science communicators, parents and children; how Karen’s art brought out the soft side of evolution; the difficulty of turning evolution into a story; or the power of kinesthetic learning. Today what’s on my mind is the concept of clades. In the old way of thinking, each living thing went into one or another categorical bucket, as in bird, reptile or mammal. In terms of clades, there are no buckets. Instead there are countless branch points, each leading on to more branch points. A clade is an ancestral population and all living things that ever descended from that population. Each time the evolutionary tree of life branches, both new branches are still part of the original clade, but each also represents a smaller clade of its own. Grandmother Fish shows children how living things are related, branch by branch. What excites me about this is that it demonstrates a new way of thinking about relatedness. In the old way of thinking, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals were all classes of vertebrate. In the new way of thinking, reptiles and birds are in one clade, with mammals in a sister clade. Those two clade combine in the amniote clade, with amphibians as their sister clade. Then the amniotes and amphibians combine in the tetrapod clade, and so on. Where 19th century scientists saw tetrapods as four classes, 21st century scientists see them as countless nested populations defined by sequential branching in the family tree. That’s one of the subtexts of Grandmother Fish, that we organize living things according to their lines of evolutionary descent.

Creationists can’t create a book to match Grandmother Fish. They have no cogent explanation for why animals resemble each other the way they do. The evolutionary family trees in Grandmother Fish show children how various sorts of animals are related to each other. Creationists can’t even generate a list of which animals are which kind. They say that each animal is in one and only one kind, and that these kinds have biological reality, but they can’t assign each animal to a kind. That’s because animals come in clades, not kinds. Relationships among animals are complex. Creationism reduces relationship down to a single factor: for any two animals, are they the same kind or not? Evolution posits a more complex and informative question: for any two animals, what was their most recent common ancestor, what was it like, when did it live, and where?  That’s what the five Grandmothers are in Grandmother Fish, they’re common ancestors found at major branch points in the history of our lineage.

The two-page phylogenetic tree in Grandmother Fish was a stretch goal, and I’m glad we added it to the book. Getting each branch point in the right sequence was a challenge, especially because genetic testing is rewriting the tree year by year. But the hard work means that these two pages include a large amount of scientific information, all distilled down to a simple, visually appealing diagram. It’s the sort of information that one can’t imagine without understanding the concept of common descent.

Successful Kickstarter!

Successfully funded!

While I was running the Grandmother Fish Kickstarter campaign, I let this blog go silent. The good news is that our Kickstarter was successful, the book is due out early next year, and the blog is back! We raised over $36,000 with over a thousand backers, which means that a lot of people got excited about this book. Karen Lewis, my artist, really came through with some amazing artwork. My personal highlight was getting the thumbs up from Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, two of my all-time favorites. Overall, the response was amazingly positive, and now I have connections in the world of science communication, and it’s gotten me excited about doing more science for kids. 

If you want to see what Grandmother Fish is about, see our Kickstarter page.

If you want to preorder your own copy, see our online preorder store.

The cutest thing you can see is our highlights reel of parents reading the book to their children for the first time. 

Several people have suggested next books for me to write. A popular suggestion is climate change. Climate change is the great big impending catastrophe that doesn’t scare us into action even though we see it coming. Once I got into evolution circles through Grandmother Fish, I was basically in climate change circles, too. Lots of overlap. But how would I write a children’s book about climate change that describes the situation and doesn’t make children cry? Does the parent say, “ That’s right, my child. You and I are killing the planet every day just by leading our daily lives”? Not sure how to make that issue into a children’s book that a child would want read to them a second time. 

Another popular topic is prepping nonreligious children for encounters with religious classmates and friends. Lots of parents report that their kids don’t even understand the question when their peers ask things like, “Are you saved?” A children’s book that explains religion to nonreligious kids—that would attract some attention. Also, plenty of atheists would probably hate it because the book wouldn’t say that religion is a mental illness or a virus. Robert Wright, Nicholas Wade, David Sloan Wilson and former ministers who are now in the atheist movement have all documented some actual good that religions have done. I would keep it positive, but being positive in itself will be controversial.

More science is a another thought. Personally, I like the self-referential nature of Grandmother Fish, and I have been trying to imagine how I would make a second book that also helps a young person place themselves in the world. Maybe it would be about speech, consciousness, or the vast scale of the universe. Grandmother Fish is so special that it will be a hard act to follow. 

Promoting Grandmother Fish also got me involved in the local secular community, and I even went the the Atheist Alliance of America’s national convention here in SeaTac in July. I would go to lots of places to meet Steven Pinker, which I did. As I expected, the secular community includes a lot of people who love to mock religion and who are turned off by anything touchy-feely, such as community or ceremony. But I was also surprised to find a number of people who don’t see the appeal in making fun of Christians. One staffer told me she was a spiritual atheist, which you don’t hear every day. Others seemed to voice a desire to have a venue for a real community, with a lot of interest in Sunday Assembly, the nonreligious “church.”

Being away from the blog and running the Kickstarter means that I have a number of interesting experiences and topics to start blogging about. My plan is to go back to my weekly format, posting on Sundays. Thanks for reading!

Announcing Grandmother Fish

Mockup of my upcoming children's book

My next creative project, coming this summer, is Grandmother Fish, a book for young children about evolution. It’s a picture book that follows the descent of humans and other vertebrates from early fish to today. It’s based on hard scientific knowledge, but it’s a child-friendly story with fun motions and sounds.

People react positively when I mention this book. They smile, their eyes light up, and often they volunteer that it sounds like a worthy project. Two fathers have even told me that they’ve had plans to write just such a book themselves. These reactions suggest to me that people want to see a book like this. That’s why I’m doing it. Granted, I live in Seattle, where people think warmly of evolution. This book might not do well in Texas.

The original idea for this book came to me 15 years ago when my daughter was young, and I worked to explain where we came from. For years, I've tinkered with the manuscript, and last year I added motions and sounds to the book. Those fun elements make the book a lot more engaging for young children.

I wanted my daughter to know how we evolved because knowing where we came from tells us something fundamental about who we are. Parents have been doing the same thing for ages. My Scandinavian ancestors taught their children that the gods had formed the first people from trees, and the ancient Hebrews said their god had created the first man from clay and the first woman from his rib. These stories have the advantage that they make sense to children. Today, any parent who believes in the Garden of Eden can find multiple books for young children that tell the story, complete with child-friendly illustrations. Parents who want to teach their children about evolution deserve books of their own.

Parents need help teaching their children about evolution because gradual change over millions of years doesn’t make much sense to the human brain. Our early human ancestors evolved brains that love stories, especially stories about people taking actions to reach their short-term goals. Mythical creation stories follow this intuitive pattern, teaching that humans and other animals were created intentionally and quickly by the gods. Evolution, however, operates without intention and on a time scale that beggars the imagination. Because evolution doesn't work like a story, traditional creation stories still appeal strongly to many people. Grandmother Fish is as simple as any creation story. The goal is to help children see for themselves how we are directly related to other animals.

Evolution is a story worth telling because it’s more than scientific fact. It’s also a profound lesson about our place in the cosmos. Traditional creation stories set humans apart from, above, and beyond the rest of the animal kingdom.  The story of evolution corrects this self-centered view. Evolution affirms our intimate connection to the world of living things, down to our flesh and blood. It’s a message that the world could use more of. As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science. In my view, it’s also a soaring spiritual experience.”

This summer, I’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for Grandmother Fish, and I hope you’ll back it and share the news. In the meantime, I’m finding an artist to partner with, planning the practical job of publishing a book, and lining up help from people who could help promote the project. Thanks to my decades of work in the roleplaying game field, I know plenty of professionals who can help me with art, publishing, and promotion.

If you like the sound of this project and would like to help, there are a few ways you could pitch in right now.

1. Read a draft version of the book to children and give me feedback on what works best and what doesn’t.

2. Introduce me to any scientists or organizations that might support the project.

3. Share this blog post. Talk to your friends about the book. Over the next couple months, think of people you know who might be interested in the campaign when it starts.

Thanks for your interest.