[WARNING — People who are humor impaired should not read this article, especially if you have a strong aversion to dripping sarcasm.]
Almost a decade ago, I became a professional writer because Richard Dawkins basically said that the theory of evolution had rendered belief in God into delusional thought.
I spent the next several years of my life reading everything I could find in the library on the subject of evolution, looking for a book that might explain the missing secret ingredient that allowed macro evolution to occur. Most biologists have seemed to agree on the belief that evolution from an existing species into a new type of creature requires three things: sexual reproduction, isolation of the gene pool in a small breeding population, and time. But that isn’t really enough to explain the diversity of life on earth, is it?
Let’s look at a few of these alleged factors that allow evolution to occur:
Isolation of a small breeding population — think about the diversity of life in an ocean. We can cast our lines into the water and possibly catch trout, bass, flounder, mackerel, shark…and the list continues for quite a while. How did all of those different species of fish (and don’t forget mammals, etc.) evolve into different types of creatures from a single common ancestor?
If the theory of evolution really is true, humans aren’t just related to monkeys because of sex, isolation of a gene pool, and time. We’re also related to every other living organism on the planet by those same three mechanisms.
Sexual Reproduction — here it gets a little tricky, because sexual reproduction can only be observed in perpetuating existing species. The emergence of a new species cannot be observed due to time constraints…we can observe reproduction, but not production.
New life can be created one of two ways: either two sexually compatible members of the same species mate and produce fertile offspring, or two individuals that are members of closely related but different species (horse and mule, zebra and donkey, etc.) mate and give birth to living but sterile offspring, a biological dead end.
Time — how much time is needed for one species to metamorphose into a new species with a completely different body plan? Was there a rhyme or reason to the reversal of certain dominant and recessive genes that allowed monkeys to evolve into humans?
For nearly a decade, I’ve been asking the same question to anyone who will listen, over and over…what environmental factor, besides sex, isolation, and time, creates a new creature by random chance?
I’ve penned open letters to Jerry Coyne, Francis Collins, and Ken Miller asking the experts on biology what the missing ingredient might be.
Who could have ever guessed that I’d find the answer to my question in a silly game originally (intelligently) designed for children?
While I sit around all day writing books and thinking about what to write next, my wife earns the majority of the income that pays our bills. Recently on a business trip to New York, she downloaded the game Pokemon Go on her cell phone on orders from her boss, so that she might participate in a team building exercise.
My wife has an obsessive-compulsive personality and returned home addicted to walking around trying to catch silly cartoon characters with her cell phone. Initially I went along the exercise, because we walked more in one month than we had in the previous year — logging an astonishing total distance of 100 kilometers in under 30 days.
The only problem for our walks would occur when a virtual Pokemon character would appear on her cell phone, and she wanted to stop long enough to catch it. More interested in the exercise, I tended to continue walking and found myself frequently leaving her behind.
The solution, naturally, was for me to load the silly game on my phone in order to play along with her. However, while playing I’ve discovered that the game models the real world perhaps better than one might think at first glance.
For example, to make yourself more attractive to Pokemon, you can put out lures or burn incense to draw them near.
All of the elements of evolution theory are there…survival of the fittest? Got it covered. Pokemon gyms are places where these mythical creatures engage in mortal combat. 
Entropy? Yep, you bet. Pokemon typically “spawn” in the wild, but they only hang around for a limited time before disappearing. Creatures that sort of look like rats or rabbits tend to spawn in the wild like, well, rats or rabbits. Other Pokemon characters are considerably more rare — not easy to find, catch, or hatch.
Pokemon can also be collected in eggs that must be incubated and hatched. Creatures that have already evolved cannot be hatched from eggs, however. Just like evolution in the real world, rules do seem to apply, but no one fully understands them or can even say what those rules are.
Most importantly, the game teaches us how evolution really works — you simply press a button that says “Evolve” and your Pokemon changes into a completely new creature, right before your very eyes.
It’s like a miracle! Of course, in order to successfully evolve a Pokemon requires just a tad more than the simple push of a single button.
First you must collect stardust — the complex chemical compounds that comprise all matter formed from stardust created by the death of a star. Just like the song Woodstock (written by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) says:
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon.
Who could have guess that Pokemon are too, apparently. These cartoon creations require virtual stardust to evolve in their intelligently designed world.
And what was the other special “secret” ingredient that causes evolution of one Pokemon species into a completely different one?
Special Pokemon candy.
Apparently that’s the real secret of evolution.
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