Art student Tyler Rhodes' evolution animation may be excessively cutesy, but the process he used to make it gets to the heart of Darwinian evolution. Tyler started by himself sketching a small salamander like creature, and then gave it to a group of elementary school children and told them to copy it. Of course, none of them copied it exactly, and their errors acted as the natural variety generated by genetic mutation. Pretty clever.To determine which new organism survived over time, Rhodes then made up environmental changes, like meteor strikes, desertification, and an ice age, and asked the children to pick out which of the doodled organisms appeared to be better suited to survive each scenario, and then used the survivors as the new model to be copied. After six generations and 100+ drawings, Rhodes had a mini evolutionary narrative and threw it all into the pretty nicely made animation above. Apparently, the animation is a continuing work in progress, as Rhodes captions his video, "I’ll eventually be working my way through this animation 4 more times with each groups’ drawings, and with each group having their own unique end sequence."It’s a brilliant idea, and an excellent way of demonstrating the variation and environmental pressures that drive evolution. Just, please, nobody share the video with Rick Santorum. I know he’ll call it classroom propaganda, which would sort of make me want to puke.
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