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BW3: Students should be able to outline evolution by natural selection and how it explains the diversity of living things.

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BW3: Students should be able to outline evolution by natural selection and how it explains the diversity of living things.

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BW 2,   E&S 7.
NOS 1, 10.

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                                                            Links to resources

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Being literate: There is a strong link to literacy in this outcome as there are many new terms and concepts that students may not have been aware of before, these should improve their literacy.

Managing information and thinking : There will be a lot of information in this outcome, as well as many links to other areas in the biological world and nature of science strands. The students will have to manage all the information to form the links and there will be some degree of thinking about concepts and theories in different ways.

Working with others: There will be a lot of group work and discussion used in the teaching of this outcome and students will have to develop good team work skills such as listening, compromising and voicing opinions.

Communicating: The students will have to build communication skills between each other as a result of working as groups but will also need to to build skills in communicating with the class as a whole as well as the teacher.

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This is an interesting ICT lab that can help students to better understand the concept of evolution.

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Discover how you’re connected to everything that’s alive and everything that’s ever lived.

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Many students will view any discoveries of evolution to be historic, this is an example of more recent discoveries in this field to show that science is always progressing.

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In a rare congruence of new evidence, two fossil jaws cast a fused beam of light on one of the darkest mysteries in human evolution: the origin of our genus Homo. The two lower jaws-one a reconstruction of a pivotal specimen found half a century ago, the other freshly plucked from the badlands of Ethiopia-point to East Africa as the birthplace of our evolutionary lineage.

The new Ethiopian fossil, announced online by the journal Science, pushes the arrival of Homo on the East African landscape back almost half a million years, to 2.8 million years ago. The date is tantalizingly close to the last known appearance, around three million years ago, of Australopithecus afarensis, an upright-walking, small-brained species best known from the skeleton called Lucy, believed by many scientists to be the direct ancestor of our genus. The new jaw, known as LD 350-1, was found in January 2013 just a dozen miles from where Lucy was found in 1974.

"This is exciting stuff," says paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered Lucy.

The Afar, part of the East African Rift Valley, has yielded many other prize fossils of hominins-members of the extended human family-including the previous earliest known Homo specimen, an upper jaw known as AL 666-1, dated to 2.3 million years ago. (Learn more about Ardi, another human ancestor from the Afar region.)

Fossils attributed to Homo in the period two to three million years ago are exceedingly rare. Bill Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, in Tempe, who co-led the analysis of the new specimen, once said that "You could put them all into a small shoe box and still have room for a good pair of shoes." (See more about the hunt for fossils of humans' early ancestors.)

Among the features placing the new fossil in that singular shoe box are slim molar teeth; a particular pattern of tooth cusps; and the shape of the bony body of the mandible-all traits shared with later Homo. But the front of the jaw sports more primitive morphology, such as a receding chin line, characteristic of A. afarensis.

"This narrows the time period in which we can now focus our search for the emergence of the human lineage," says Kimbel, who found the AL 666-1 jaw in 1994. "It's very much a transitional form, as would be expected at that age. The chin looks backwards in time. But the shape of the teeth looks forward."

To the extent that the new jaw underscores an East African origin for the genus Homo, it would seem to confound the argument made by other researchers that the best candidate for our genus's immediate ancestor is a South African australopithecine, Australopithecus sediba.

The authors of the Science paper point out that the only known specimens of A. sediba are almost a million years younger than the new Homo jaw from Ethiopia that they would have had to have given rise to.

Fred Grine of New York's Stony Brook University, however, counters that there may well have been other populations of A. sediba, or something like it, far older. (Learn more about how A. sediba shook up the human family tree.)

"The idea that [the new jaw] makes anything else unlikely to be an ancestor is ludicrous," says Grine. "That would pretend that the fossil record is complete. And we know it can't be, since they just discovered something that wasn't there before."

The site where the jaw was found, called Ledi-Geraru, was a mix of grasslands and a few shrubs 2.8 million years ago, similar to the Serengeti today, according to an accompanying paper by Erin DiMaggio of Penn State University and colleagues. The animal species present at the same time indicate a shift to a more open, arid habitat, supporting a hypothesis that global climate change at the time may have triggered evolutionary changes in many animal lineages.

"We can see the 2.8-million-year-old aridity signal in the Ledi-Geraru faunal community," says Kaye Reed, director of the Ledi-Geraru project at the Institute of Human Origins. "But it's still too soon to say that this means climate change is responsible for the origin of Homo."

The Ethiopian jaw is enough on its own to cause a surge of excitement among paleoanthropologists. But its significance is magnified by the reconstruction of a Homo fossil a million years younger, published Wednesday in the journal .

The jaw belongs to the original, or type, specimen of Homo habilis, or "Handy Man," so-called by its discoverers Louis and Mary Leakey in 1964 because it was found in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania in sediments that also contained the oldest stone tools known at the time. (Much older tools, dating to at least 2.6 million years ago, have since been uncovered in Ethiopia.)

Louis Leakey and his colleagues maintained that H. habilis was the most likely ancestor of all later Homo, including our own species Homo sapiens. H. habilis has clung unsteadily to that exalted perch in the family tree ever since, its precariousness caused in part by the fragmentary nature of the type specimen. It consists of a heavily distorted jawbone, a collection of many small skull fragments, and pieces of a hand.

Using computed tomography (CT) and state-of-the-art 3-D imaging technology, a team led by Fred Spoor of the University College, London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Germany, has now digitally reconstructed what the mandible would have looked like in life. Its narrow shape, with tooth rows parallel to each other, is more like that of an australopithecine, the group of human ancestors that predates the Homo genus.

Though younger by half a million years than the AL 666-1 upper jaw from the Afar, the reconstructed jawbone from Olduvia Gorge is clearly more primitive. This suggests that an even more primitive "ghost lineage" of Homo must have existed well before 2.3 million years ago, which split and gave rise to both lineages.

And lo and behold: the new Ethiopian jaw neatly fits the bill.

"The Ledi-Geraru jaw has turned up as if 'on request,' suggesting a plausible evolutionary link between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis," says Spoor.

In another plot twist, Spoor and his colleagues digitally reconstructed the braincase of the original H. habilis specimen, which had previously been estimated to hold about 700 cubic centimeters of actual brain-more than a typical australopithecine, but less than later humans. Their new version upped the volume to 800 cubic centimeters, advancing habilis into the same cerebral class as two other Homo species gadding about the East African savanna by two million years ago- Homo rudolfensis and early forms of Homo erectus.

"What we have is a beast with a very primitive snout, but with big brains," Spoor said, when he first discussed the reconstruction at a meeting at the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya last August.

Since it is unlikely that the three contemporaneous species Homo habilis, H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus evolved large brains independently, it follows that their common ancestor had already set the course toward an enlarged brain, much earlier than previously thought. This could reestablish the link between the appearance of larger brains in the hominin lineage and the first stone tools.

So perhaps H. habilis -depending on how far back that species lived-was a bona fide Handy Man after all.
Follow Jamie Shreeve on Twitter.

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Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree

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In a rare congruence of new evidence, two fossil jaws cast a fused beam of light on one of the darkest mysteries in human evolution: the origin of our genus Homo. The two lower jaws-one a reconstruction of a pivotal specimen found half a century ago, the other freshly plucked from the badlands of Ethiopia-point to East Africa as the birthplace of our evolutionary lineage.

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This video is short enough to keep students attention while getting across some fundamental ideas involved with evolution

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Four billion years of evolution in six minutes | Prosanta Chakrabarty

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Interactive games can help students to create links between the conceptual and the contextual. This article on evolution board games suggests good ideas for innovative ways to teach students about evolution.

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The world is in the golden age of strategy board games, with thousands of new board games published each year, especially in the past decade (Beard 2016; BGG 2019). Recently, we have seen a rise in science‐themed board games (Jolin 2019). Educational games have been around for decades, but the majority of the old guard are forgettable and dull, limiting their academic value. In the past decade, however, many educational games rival games intended purely for entertainment (e.g., Cytosis by Genius Games). The newest kids on the block are a slew of fun, high‐quality evolution‐themed board games, whose elaborate mechanisms and aesthetic beauty show great promise for engaging and teaching students (West 2015; Coil et al. 2017; Chuang 2017). Our research group (undergraduates, graduate students, and two professors) evaluated the utility of many of these newer games for scientific education in the field of evolution. We also integrated our top‐ranked games into an upper‐level college course that explored the mechanisms that drive the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity through geological time.

Distilling complex evolutionary concepts through seemingly simplistic models is commonplace in evolutionary biology. For example, John Maynard Smith famously used game theory to characterize Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (Maynard Smith 1972), and subsequently, game theory has been widely evoked to improve understanding of group selection (Queller 1984), sexual selection (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999), altruism (Hamilton 1971), parental care (Clutton‐Brock and Godfray 1991), and coevolution (Brown and Vincent 1987). In a very general and broad framework, both game theory and board games emphasize strategy and consequences for decision makers (i.e., individuals or game players). Thus, it is not surprising that strategy‐based board games naturally extend to evolution education. These board games can actually be used to simulate specific ecological and evolutionary elements, and therefore have wide utility in classrooms to emphasize curricula. Specifically, students can critically evaluate these board games in the context of evolution‐based learning objectives by identifying which evolutionary concepts the games omit, get right, or get wrong. Evolution by its very nature tends to be subtle and coupled with stochastic processes, which, if perfectly emulated as a board game, would be dull and monotonous. As a result, board game designers abstract many of the ecological and evolutionary processes to facilitate game progression. Game designers also add extensive player agency to evolutionary "choices," which result in a more engaging experience, but at its core, produce an inherently flawed evolutionary simulation. And of course, board games typically proceed with a fixed "goal" over a finite time period, which is in glaring contrast with actually evolutionary processes. Despite these limitations, board games provide innovative ways to engage and motivate students in addition to traditional methods (Sharp 2012). Further, games are interactive and dynamic, which provides opportunities to reinforce key concepts and explore novel scenarios (Sharp 2012). Lastly, many learning objectives are integrated into these games, which can increase comprehension and academic performance (Schwartzman 1997; Saliés 2002).

For this project, we first explored and then critically evaluated 11 currently available evolution‐themed strategy board games that appeared to have both high educational and entertainment value (Table 1). After many nights of heavy competition (and plenty of extinction events!), we settled on a hierarchy of the best evolution‐themed games. We based our rankings on composite high scores comprising theme, complexity, educational value, and of course, entertainment value. Here, we present written reviews of four of our top evolution‐themed board games: "Evolution: The Beginning," "Evolution: Climate," both by North Star Games; "Biosphere" by DDD Verlag GmbH; and "Bios: Megafauna (second edition)" by Sierra Madre Games. All four games have a strong link in gameplay to key biological concepts and, importantly, were a lot of fun to play. Our full rankings of each game and their potential educational value are presented in Table S1 and extended written reviews are available online at www.darwinsgamenight.org along with associated teaching materials. We also discuss how student‐guided learning through modification of existing board games can further elevate conceptual comprehension and class discussions.

Board game name

Publisher

Players

Complexity

Playtime (minutes)

Rank

Darwin's Choice

Treeceratops

2-6

Medium

60-90

6*

Evo (second edition)

Asmodee Games

2-4

Medium

60

6*

Top‐Rated Board Games

The first game, Evolution: The Beginning, is a breezy Darwinian knife fight. Players "evolve" their species to outsmart other players' species competing for the same limited food. To get an edge, players can "adapt" their species to become carnivores (that now eat other species), increase foraging efficiency, or boost reproductive rate. Other predators can be avoided by evolving to become nocturnal, flying, or burrowing. Points are scored for the amount eaten during the game and for the number and quality of the species you have left at the game's end. The player with the most points wins.

Evolution: The Beginning is a great complement to an introduction to evolutionary theory. The small size and limited components make the game approachable for all types of students. It is particularly well‐suited for teaching evolutionary arms races, adaptations, and interspecific interactions. In particular, we think the game is excellent for demonstrating how evolution has no foresight-a difficult concept for many students. Students first play the game by the publisher rules. Then students play a second time without looking at any of their trait cards, which are then randomly assigned to their species. Despite being simple and straightforward, Evolution: The Beginning is full of rich strategic decisions based on real evolutionary concepts.

Evolution: Climate elevates Evolution: The Beginning from a two‐dimensional game, where players deal with the threats of starvation and predation, into a three‐dimensional game by adding the effects of changing climates. In Evolution: Climate, the core framework presented in Evolution: The Beginning is maintained. However, the array of adaptations increases, and players also need to avoid extinction from changing climates. This can be done by evolving "heavy fur," "cooling frills," or by "migrating," depending on which climate crisis may be looming. Points are again scored by consuming food, and for the number and quality of the species you have left at the end of the game. The player with the most points wins.

Evolution: Climate is our top‐rated evolution themed strategy board game for use as an educational resource. It is a phenomenal game, full of rich strategic and tactical decisions. The added complexity and interplay between the climate and species dramatically expand the potential uses for educational purposes. The gameplay, however, remains fairly simple to understand (and to teach). It is also worth noting that Evolution: Climate, and other games in the Evolution series, possess amazing and distinctive artwork. The imaginative and bright watercolor art perfectly weaves the elegance of gameplay with its evolutionary theme and definitely helps immerse players in the game. We think this game is a great hands‐on activity to complement curricula on a variety of subjects, including evolutionary arms races, mass extinction events, climate change (both future and past), ecological and evolutionary physiology, and interspecific interactions. However, given its complexity, instructors should be prepared for a range in comprehension by students using the game as part of a curriculum. We highly recommend both Evolution games for use in most high school or college classrooms.

We also played two more games that required a few hours to play due to their increased complexity: Biosphere and Bios: Megafauna. The length of gameplay and complexity narrow the breadth of their academic use, but also increase scientific realism, allowing for more in‐depth connections to evolutionary concepts (e.g., the causes of the mass extinctions, or the demographic and genetic consequences of habitat configuration and change).

In Biosphere, players control a species at the dawn of its arrival to a vast uncolonized landscape. At the start of the game, each player's species is poorly adapted to the new landscape and can only survive a few years in each of the six biomes. During the game, players "evolve" their species to increase its reproductive rate, movement, and biome‐specific lifespan. The core gameplay is driven by hundreds of small dice representing individuals, and their values represent that individual's remaining lifespan ⁠-a clever mechanic that adds realism to the game. As the game progresses, each species radiates across the mosaic of available biomes. Players win the game by achieving five randomly selected evolutionary goals associated with dominating a biome type(s), having the largest population, adapting to all biomes, or occupying a number of biome tiles.

Biosphere is one of the few evolution‐themed games that are a mix of long‐term strategic decisions and turn‐to‐turn tactics. The many randomly chosen goals also vary gameplay, which results in interesting and new challenges every game (see our house rules and additional gameplay materials for increased utility in the classroom on www.darwinsgamenight.org). Biosphere is a great companion to a curriculum on conservation biology, habitat ecology, and population genetics. We were also able to mix Biosphere with demographic and genetic computer simulations (e.g., see "connecting population genetics, demography and evolution" at www.darwinsgamenight.org).

Bios: Megafauna is an incredibly deep game that spans the last 500 million years on Earth and ends at the dawn of the Quaternary period. The game begins at the start of the Phanerozoic, where players attempt the long and difficult journey to evolve from a simple archetype of a plant, mollusk, insect, or vertebrate, to a much more complex species and dominate Earth's early biomes. Players compete to colonize ancient continents that are subject to dramatic tectonic activity, cosmic events, and changing atmospheres. The game ends at the dawn of the Quaternary, and the player with the highest population on Earth and highest species diversity (both extinct and living) wins.

This game is an absolute educational gem and could be used to reinforce many key evolutionary and geological concepts. This mostly stems from the fact that the core gameplay mechanisms are directly tied to actual geological events and key biological innovations. Bios: Megafauna and its sibling Bios: Genesis, which we also ranked highly, cover a broad array of topics that could reinforce classroom curricula. However, these games are incredibly complex, which makes them very difficult to teach. Most of our participants became overwhelmed at some point. We mitigated this by implementing a few house rules and ensured that there was someone who completely understood the rules that frequented each game group. Overall Bios: Megafauna is a rewarding mix of short‐term strategy and tactics that will leave you pondering your decisions for days. However, the game was also quite punishing and left a few students sour from luck‐based outcomes. Many times, these instances provided teaching opportunities and we would discuss the science behind negative events. For example, the Chicxulub Comet Impact at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary 66 million years ago released large quantities of SO ₂ and carbonates into the atmosphere, which increased the greenhouse effect and, in combination with the Deccan Traps, increased global temperatures by 4°C (Bond and Grasby 2017). In the real world, these events caused mass extinctions; the game mimics this event by forcing many players to lose all or most of their species. Nonetheless, active discussions tied the game back to class material and helped to diminish negativity. Lastly, the complexity and the many situational rules make the game feel like a mix between a simulation and a strategy board game. Because of this, the game is entertaining, but does not beg for immediate replay.

Using Evolution‐Themed Board Games in the Classroom

Our course was an introduction to historical and contemporary biogeography, and as we progressed through our curriculum, the associated games increased in complexity and spatio‐temporal scope. We moved from population‐level processes over short periods of time to global processes over half a billion years. This was intentional and provided a gateway to the more complex and rule‐heavy games, particularly for students less familiar with strategy board games. In addition, to reinforce key concepts, the board games were also tied into course projects. For example, participants were tasked with developing and presenting a course curriculum associated with a key concept emulated in one of the board games. Students also modified one of the games so that the game better implemented key evolutionary or ecological concepts to increase the scientific accuracy and educational value. For example, several students modified the games to demonstrate the effects of urbanization, habitat fragmentation, climate change, and island biogeography. Other students modified games so they reflected different biomes (i.e., aquatic ecosystems) and different taxonomic groups (plant or microbe communities). Some students added probability in the outcomes of traditional binary outcomes, such as attack or reproductive success. Finally, a few students increased the biological realism of games by incorporating key ecological, evolutionary, or demographic processes. These ranged from community‐driven behavioral processes, such as the landscape of fear, to implementing an explicit link between reproduction rate, resource availability, and carrying capacity. The diversity of students' biological interests paved the way to this broad array of projects reflecting different biological concepts, which enriched the overall learning experience beyond concepts reflected in board games alone.

These hands‐on exercises required participants to think about the core biological processes of interest in context of the infrastructure and constraints of the associated board game. The medium to high tactile interactivity also resonated well with most of the participants, and they were eager to explore new strategies in their efforts to win.

Conclusion

None of these games perfectly emulated evolution, which we knew going into the course, and every game grossly convoluted the boundaries between intelligent design and natural selection. However, this was a deliberate and important decision by the game designers, as it provided agency to each player to directly "strategize" and permute different solutions to evolutionary success. Specifically, player agency in vested players in the game and its outcome. This resulted in dynamic gameplay, where rapid‐arms races and intense competition drove players' "evolutionary" responses. Post‐gameplay, we found that students greatly benefited from guided discussions on how each game succeeded and failed in emulating the core evolutionary and ecological concepts, which promoted critical thought by encouraging students to reflect on the experience.

Each game we reviewed brought its own strengths and pitfalls in the context of teaching evolution; although none were perfect, all offered different insights into biological processes (Table 2). Overall, board games present an interactive and fun experience for many types of curricula (Sardone and Devlin‐Scherer 2016; Taspinar et al. 2016). We hope our evaluations can be a resource for instructors teaching many aspects of ecology and evolution. Notably, some of the greater insights we gained during our trial run were through students' course projects, drawn from their scientific backgrounds. Perhaps student innovation will pave the way forward to even higher quality games. Either way, we can attest that many of these evolution‐themed board games meet the mark for entertainment both in and outside the classroom, and we encourage biology instructors at diverse academic levels to give them a try.

Board game name

Concepts addressed well

Taxa included

Associate Editor: N. Johnson

Handling Editor: T. Chapman

The world is in the golden age of strategy board games, with thousands of new board games published each year, especially in the past decade (Beard ; BGG ). Recently, we have seen a rise in science‐themed board games (Jolin ). Educational games have been around for decades, but the majority of the old guard are forgettable and dull, limiting their academic value. In the past decade, however, many educational games rival games intended purely for entertainment (e.g., Cytosis by Genius Games). The newest kids on the block are a slew of fun, high‐quality evolution‐themed board games, whose elaborate mechanisms and aesthetic beauty show great promise for engaging and teaching students (West ; Coil et al. ; Chuang ). Our research group (undergraduates, graduate students, and two professors) evaluated the utility of many of these newer games for scientific education in the field of evolution. We also integrated our top‐ranked games into an upper‐level college course that explored the mechanisms that drive the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity through geological time.

Distilling complex evolutionary concepts through seemingly simplistic models is commonplace in evolutionary biology. For example, John Maynard Smith famously used game theory to characterize Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (Maynard Smith ), and subsequently, game theory has been widely evoked to improve understanding of group selection (Queller ), sexual selection (Zahavi and Zahavi ), altruism (Hamilton ), parental care (Clutton‐Brock and Godfray ), and coevolution (Brown and Vincent ). In a very general and broad framework, both game theory and board games emphasize strategy and consequences for decision makers (i.e., individuals or game players). Thus, it is not surprising that strategy‐based board games naturally extend to evolution education. These board games can actually be used to simulate specific ecological and evolutionary elements, and therefore have wide utility in classrooms to emphasize curricula. Specifically, students can critically evaluate these board games in the context of evolution‐based learning objectives by identifying which evolutionary concepts the games omit, get right, or get wrong. Evolution by its very nature tends to be subtle and coupled with stochastic processes, which, if perfectly emulated as a board game, would be dull and monotonous. As a result, board game designers abstract many of the ecological and evolutionary processes to facilitate game progression. Game designers also add extensive player agency to evolutionary "choices," which result in a more engaging experience, but at its core, produce an inherently flawed evolutionary simulation. And of course, board games typically proceed with a fixed "goal" over a finite time period, which is in glaring contrast with actually evolutionary processes. Despite these limitations, board games provide innovative ways to engage and motivate students in addition to traditional methods (Sharp ). Further, games are interactive and dynamic, which provides opportunities to reinforce key concepts and explore novel scenarios (Sharp ). Lastly, many learning objectives are integrated into these games, which can increase comprehension and academic performance (Schwartzman ; Saliés ).

For this project, we first explored and then critically evaluated 11 currently available evolution‐themed strategy board games that appeared to have both high educational and entertainment value (Table 1). After many nights of heavy competition (and plenty of extinction events!), we settled on a hierarchy of the best evolution‐themed games. We based our rankings on composite high scores comprising theme, complexity, educational value, and of course, entertainment value. Here, we present written reviews of four of our top evolution‐themed board games: "Evolution: The Beginning," "Evolution: Climate," both by North Star Games; "Biosphere" by DDD Verlag GmbH; and "Bios: Megafauna (second edition)" by Sierra Madre Games. All four games have a strong link in gameplay to key biological concepts and, importantly, were a lot of fun to play. Our full rankings of each game and their potential educational value are presented in Table S1 and extended written reviews are available online at www.darwinsgamenight.org along with associated teaching materials. We also discuss how student‐guided learning through modification of existing board games can further elevate conceptual comprehension and class discussions.

Top‐Rated Board Games

The first game, Evolution: The Beginning, is a breezy Darwinian knife fight. Players "evolve" their species to outsmart other players' species competing for the same limited food. To get an edge, players can "adapt" their species to become carnivores (that now eat other species), increase foraging efficiency, or boost reproductive rate. Other predators can be avoided by evolving to become nocturnal, flying, or burrowing. Points are scored for the amount eaten during the game and for the number and quality of the species you have left at the game's end. The player with the most points wins.

Evolution: The Beginning is a great complement to an introduction to evolutionary theory. The small size and limited components make the game approachable for all types of students. It is particularly well‐suited for teaching evolutionary arms races, adaptations, and interspecific interactions. In particular, we think the game is excellent for demonstrating how evolution has no foresight-a difficult concept for many students. Students first play the game by the publisher rules. Then students play a second time without looking at any of their trait cards, which are then randomly assigned to their species. Despite being simple and straightforward, Evolution: The Beginning is full of rich strategic decisions based on real evolutionary concepts.

Evolution: Climate elevates Evolution: The Beginning from a two‐dimensional game, where players deal with the threats of starvation and predation, into a three‐dimensional game by adding the effects of changing climates. In Evolution: Climate, the core framework presented in Evolution: The Beginning is maintained. However, the array of adaptations increases, and players also need to avoid extinction from changing climates. This can be done by evolving "heavy fur," "cooling frills," or by "migrating," depending on which climate crisis may be looming. Points are again scored by consuming food, and for the number and quality of the species you have left at the end of the game. The player with the most points wins.

Evolution: Climate is our top‐rated evolution themed strategy board game for use as an educational resource. It is a phenomenal game, full of rich strategic and tactical decisions. The added complexity and interplay between the climate and species dramatically expand the potential uses for educational purposes. The gameplay, however, remains fairly simple to understand (and to teach). It is also worth noting that Evolution: Climate, and other games in the Evolution series, possess amazing and distinctive artwork. The imaginative and bright watercolor art perfectly weaves the elegance of gameplay with its evolutionary theme and definitely helps immerse players in the game. We think this game is a great hands‐on activity to complement curricula on a variety of subjects, including evolutionary arms races, mass extinction events, climate change (both future and past), ecological and evolutionary physiology, and interspecific interactions. However, given its complexity, instructors should be prepared for a range in comprehension by students using the game as part of a curriculum. We highly recommend both Evolution games for use in most high school or college classrooms.

We also played two more games that required a few hours to play due to their increased complexity: Biosphere and Bios: Megafauna. The length of gameplay and complexity narrow the breadth of their academic use, but also increase scientific realism, allowing for more in‐depth connections to evolutionary concepts (e.g., the causes of the mass extinctions, or the demographic and genetic consequences of habitat configuration and change).

In Biosphere, players control a species at the dawn of its arrival to a vast uncolonized landscape. At the start of the game, each player's species is poorly adapted to the new landscape and can only survive a few years in each of the six biomes. During the game, players "evolve" their species to increase its reproductive rate, movement, and biome‐specific lifespan. The core gameplay is driven by hundreds of small dice representing individuals, and their values represent that individual's remaining lifespan ⁠-a clever mechanic that adds realism to the game. As the game progresses, each species radiates across the mosaic of available biomes. Players win the game by achieving five randomly selected evolutionary goals associated with dominating a biome type(s), having the largest population, adapting to all biomes, or occupying a number of biome tiles.

Biosphere is one of the few evolution‐themed games that are a mix of long‐term strategic decisions and turn‐to‐turn tactics. The many randomly chosen goals also vary gameplay, which results in interesting and new challenges every game (see our house rules and additional gameplay materials for increased utility in the classroom on www.darwinsgamenight.org). Biosphere is a great companion to a curriculum on conservation biology, habitat ecology, and population genetics. We were also able to mix Biosphere with demographic and genetic computer simulations (e.g., see "connecting population genetics, demography and evolution" at www.darwinsgamenight.org).

Bios: Megafauna is an incredibly deep game that spans the last 500 million years on Earth and ends at the dawn of the Quaternary period. The game begins at the start of the Phanerozoic, where players attempt the long and difficult journey to evolve from a simple archetype of a plant, mollusk, insect, or vertebrate, to a much more complex species and dominate Earth's early biomes. Players compete to colonize ancient continents that are subject to dramatic tectonic activity, cosmic events, and changing atmospheres. The game ends at the dawn of the Quaternary, and the player with the highest population on Earth and highest species diversity (both extinct and living) wins.

This game is an absolute educational gem and could be used to reinforce many key evolutionary and geological concepts. This mostly stems from the fact that the core gameplay mechanisms are directly tied to actual geological events and key biological innovations. Bios: Megafauna and its sibling Bios: Genesis, which we also ranked highly, cover a broad array of topics that could reinforce classroom curricula. However, these games are incredibly complex, which makes them very difficult to teach. Most of our participants became overwhelmed at some point. We mitigated this by implementing a few house rules and ensured that there was someone who completely understood the rules that frequented each game group. Overall Bios: Megafauna is a rewarding mix of short‐term strategy and tactics that will leave you pondering your decisions for days. However, the game was also quite punishing and left a few students sour from luck‐based outcomes. Many times, these instances provided teaching opportunities and we would discuss the science behind negative events. For example, the Chicxulub Comet Impact at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary 66 million years ago released large quantities of SO ₂ and carbonates into the atmosphere, which increased the greenhouse effect and, in combination with the Deccan Traps, increased global temperatures by 4°C (Bond and Grasby ). In the real world, these events caused mass extinctions; the game mimics this event by forcing many players to lose all or most of their species. Nonetheless, active discussions tied the game back to class material and helped to diminish negativity. Lastly, the complexity and the many situational rules make the game feel like a mix between a simulation and a strategy board game. Because of this, the game is entertaining, but does not beg for immediate replay.

Using Evolution‐Themed Board Games in the Classroom

Our course was an introduction to historical and contemporary biogeography, and as we progressed through our curriculum, the associated games increased in complexity and spatio‐temporal scope. We moved from population‐level processes over short periods of time to global processes over half a billion years. This was intentional and provided a gateway to the more complex and rule‐heavy games, particularly for students less familiar with strategy board games. In addition, to reinforce key concepts, the board games were also tied into course projects. For example, participants were tasked with developing and presenting a course curriculum associated with a key concept emulated in one of the board games. Students also modified one of the games so that the game better implemented key evolutionary or ecological concepts to increase the scientific accuracy and educational value. For example, several students modified the games to demonstrate the effects of urbanization, habitat fragmentation, climate change, and island biogeography. Other students modified games so they reflected different biomes (i.e., aquatic ecosystems) and different taxonomic groups (plant or microbe communities). Some students added probability in the outcomes of traditional binary outcomes, such as attack or reproductive success. Finally, a few students increased the biological realism of games by incorporating key ecological, evolutionary, or demographic processes. These ranged from community‐driven behavioral processes, such as the landscape of fear, to implementing an explicit link between reproduction rate, resource availability, and carrying capacity. The diversity of students' biological interests paved the way to this broad array of projects reflecting different biological concepts, which enriched the overall learning experience beyond concepts reflected in board games alone.

These hands‐on exercises required participants to think about the core biological processes of interest in context of the infrastructure and constraints of the associated board game. The medium to high tactile interactivity also resonated well with most of the participants, and they were eager to explore new strategies in their efforts to win.

Conclusion

None of these games perfectly emulated evolution, which we knew going into the course, and every game grossly convoluted the boundaries between intelligent design and natural selection. However, this was a deliberate and important decision by the game designers, as it provided agency to each player to directly "strategize" and permute different solutions to evolutionary success. Specifically, player agency in vested players in the game and its outcome. This resulted in dynamic gameplay, where rapid‐arms races and intense competition drove players' "evolutionary" responses. Post‐gameplay, we found that students greatly benefited from guided discussions on how each game succeeded and failed in emulating the core evolutionary and ecological concepts, which promoted critical thought by encouraging students to reflect on the experience.

Each game we reviewed brought its own strengths and pitfalls in the context of teaching evolution; although none were perfect, all offered different insights into biological processes (Table 2). Overall, board games present an interactive and fun experience for many types of curricula (Sardone and Devlin‐Scherer ; Taspinar et al. ). We hope our evaluations can be a resource for instructors teaching many aspects of ecology and evolution. Notably, some of the greater insights we gained during our trial run were through students' course projects, drawn from their scientific backgrounds. Perhaps student innovation will pave the way forward to even higher quality games. Either way, we can attest that many of these evolution‐themed board games meet the mark for entertainment both in and outside the classroom, and we encourage biology instructors at diverse academic levels to give them a try.

Associate Editor: N. Johnson

Handling Editor: T. Chapman

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Gaming natural selection: Using board games as simulations to teach evolution

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The world is in the golden age of strategy board games, with thousands of new board games published each year, especially in the past decade (Beard 2016; BGG 2019). Recently, we have seen a rise in science‐themed board games (Jolin 2019).

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This article addresses some common misconceptions people have about evolution.

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Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood. In a recent episode of the Australian series of "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here", former cricket star Shane Warne questioned the theory - asking "if humans evolved from monkeys, why haven't today's monkeys evolved"?

Similarly, a head teacher from a primary school in the UK recently stated that evolution is a theory rather than a fact. This is despite the fact that children in the UK start learning about evolution in Year 6 (ten to 11-year-olds), and have further lessons throughout high school. While the theory of evolution is well accepted in the UK compared with the rest of the world, a survey in 2005 indicated that more than 20% of the country's population was not sure about it, or did not accept it.

Tourism Victoria from Australia/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

In contrast, there are not many people questioning the theory of relativity, or studies on the acceptance of the theory of relativity; possibly reflecting an acceptance that this is a matter for physicists to settle. Many studies have tried to determine why evolution is questioned so often by the general public, despite complete acceptance by scientists. Although no clear answer has been found, I suspect the common misconceptions described below have something to do with it.

1. It's just a theory

Yes, scientists call it the "theory of evolution", but this is in recognition of its well accepted scientific standing. The term "theory" is being used in the same way that gravitational theory explains why, when an apple falls from your hand, it goes towards the ground. There is no uncertainty that the apple will fall to the ground, in the same way that there is no uncertainty that bugs resistant to antibiotics will continue to evolve if we do not curb our general use of antibiotics.

Although people use "theory" in everyday conversation to mean a not necessarily proven hypothesis, this is not the case in scientific terms. A scientific theory typically means a well substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that sits above laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

2. Humans are descended from monkeys

Herbert Rose Barraud (1845-1896), CC BY-SA

No, your great-great-great-ancestor was not a monkey. Evolution theory indicates that we have common ancestors with monkeys and apes - among the existing species, they are our closest relatives. Humans and chimpanzees share more than 90% of their genetic sequence. But this common ancestor, which roamed the earth approximately 7m years ago was neither a monkey nor a human, but an ape-like creature that recent research suggests had traits that favoured the use of tools.

3. Natural selection is purposeful

There are many organisms that are not perfectly adapted to their environment. For example, sharks don't have a gas bladder to control their buoyancy (which bony fish typically use). Does this refute the theory of evolution? No, not at all. Natural selection can only randomly favour the best of what is available, it does not purposefully turn all living organisms into one super creature.

It would be really convenient if humans could photosynthesise; hunger could be immediately cured by standing in the sun (and the much-sought miracle diet would have been found: stay inside). But alas, the genetic ability to photosynthesise has not appeared in animals. Still, selection of the best option possible has led to an amazing diversity of forms remarkably well adapted to their environments, even if not perfect.

4. Evolution can't explain complex organs

TobiasD/pixabay

A common argument in favour of creationism is the evolution of the eye. A half developed eye would serve no function, so how can natural selection slowly create a functional eye in a step-wise manner? Darwin himself suggested that the eye could have had its origins in organs with different functions. Organs that allow detection of light could then have been favoured by natural selection, even if it did not provide full vision. These ideas have been proven correct many years later by researchers studying primitive light-sensing organs in animals. In molluscs like snails and segmented worms, light-sense cells spread across the body surface can tell the difference between light and dark.

5. Religion is incompatible with evolution

It is important to make it clear that evolution is not a theory about the origin of life. It is a theory to explain how species change over time. Contrary to what many people think, there is also little conflict between evolution and most common religions. Pope Francis recently reiterated that a belief in evolution isn't incompatible with the Catholic faith. Going further, the reverend Malcom Brown from the Church of England stated that "natural selection, as a way of understanding physical evolutionary processes over thousands of years, makes sense." He added: "Good religion needs to work constructively with good science" and vice-versa. I fully agree.

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The five most common misunderstandings about evolution

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Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood. In a recent episode of the Australian series of "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here", former cricket star Shane Warne questioned the theory - asking "if humans evolved from monkeys, why haven't today's monkeys evolved"?

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This documentary details the human evolution. It is a useful way to showcase how evolution has affected us directly

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The Discovery Of The Earliest Human Ancestor | First Human | Timeline

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This shows examples of animals which are rapidly evolving today, it would be useful to mention some of these to show students that evolution hasn't stopped

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We sometimes think of evolution as a thing of the past, but it continues today, especially as environmental pressures force humans and animals to adapt to survive. Here, a few examples of animals evolving in real-time.

1. The lizard with extra sticky feet

The native green lizards that occupy the lower branches and trunks of Florida's trees got a rude awakening when their invasive cousins, the brown lizards, moved in. Faced with limited resources and double the competition, the green lizards made a move: they abandoned the lower branches for the treetops. Up there, the limbs are thinner and smoother, so the green lizards' bodies had to adapt to the environmental shift. To better cling to the smooth branches, their toepads grew bigger and their scales got stickier-in just 15 years and about 20 generations. "The degree and quickness with which they evolved was surprising," said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study. "If human height were evolving as fast as these lizards' toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot 9 inches today to about 6 foot 4 inches within 20 generations."

2. The shrimp that lost its eyes

In the process of evolutionary change, you either use it or you lose it-and this is certainly true for a group of cave-dwelling crustaceans. These crabs and shrimp live underground where there is no light, and the sense of sight doesn't do much good. As a result, they've gone blind, relying on smell and touch to navigate the cavernous depths. When researchers compared the brains of these spelunkers to their land-dwelling relatives, they found that not only are these creatures sightless, they're actually losing the parts of their brains associated with vision. Meanwhile, the areas that control touch and smell are getting bigger. "It's a nice example of life conditions changing the neuroanatomy," the study's lead author, Dr. Martin Stegner, from the University of Rostock in Germany, told the BBC. It's taken about 200 million years for the brain changes to occur, which may not seem "rapid," but as the Washington Post's Rachel Feltman says, it's "a relatively short time, in the evolutionary scheme of things."

3. The owls that are changing color

Climate change is forcing many animals to adapt to survive. The tawny owl in Finland is a good example. These creatures come in two colors, brown or pale grey. The cold white winters have traditionally favored the grey owls, which can hide from predators by blending into a snowy color scheme. But as the winters have become more mild over the last 50 years, researchers noticed a shift: grey owls are on the decline and the brown birds are thriving, better suited to blending into the bare brown branches of the forest. As more brown owls survive, more brown genes get passed down through generations. Until now, the researchers say, "an evolutionary response to a quantified selection pressure driven by climate change has not been empirically demonstrated in a wild population."

4. The fish that's migrating earlier

Climate change is also the driving force behind a recent behavioral shift in pink salmon. As water temperatures rise, the fish are migrating from the ocean to the river to spawn about two weeks earlier than they did 40 years ago. And this isn't just a new behavior-it's actually a change at the genetic level. Between the 1980s and 2011, the number of late-migrating salmon declined by 20 percent, according to Ryan Kovach, a population ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The change happened over just one or two generations, which suggests organisms can adapt to climate change very quickly. "We show that there has been a genetic shift towards earlier migration timing through what appears to be natural selection against the late-migrating individuals in the population," Kovach says.

5. The bedbugs with super-strength

Unfortunately, our long-running battle with these bed-hopping pests has backfired, producing bedbugs with thicker shells and nerve cells of steel to resist the harsh chemicals we lob at them. Bedbugs in New York City are now 250 times more resistant to pesticides than the bedbugs in Florida, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. "Insect resistance is nothing more than sped-up evolution," says insect toxicologist John Clark.

6. The mouse that's immune to poison

Bad news for anyone with a fear of mice: researchers have discovered a house mouse with an immunity to Warfarin, a type of poison typically deployed to fight infestations. The super mice were discovered in Germany, where the lowly house mouse bred with its poison-resistant distant cousin the Algerian mouse. The result? A hybrid mouse with a very useful genetic mutation that gives it a leg up over its rodent relatives. Usually hybrid animals can't reproduce, but "sometimes there is the occasional odd hybrid that has just about the right novel combination of genomes from two species that renders them, at least temporarily, superior over the pure species," says the study's lead author Michael Kohn. "We've caught evolution in the act."
All images courtesy of iStock unless otherwise noted.

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We sometimes think of evolution as a thing of the past, but it continues today, especially as environmental pressures force humans and animals to adapt to survive. Here, a few examples of animals evolving in real-time. 1.

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This article provided some interesting views on different levels on inquiry in the science classroom. It's focus was to provide student teachers with different science pedagogies and I found it very beneficial in providing me with some new ideas on how to introduce inquiry based learning into the classroom.

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This article covers the complexities in teaching evolution. Eg. cultural beliefs. I found this very relevant to my planning as I was working in a school with strong religious beliefs and students with religious backgrounds. It aided greatly in addressing this topic as a different way of thinking.

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                                                   Reflection

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                                                   Reflection