I’d wanted to write a piece about the real genetics of Pokemon for a very long time. The only problem is that, despite having breeding and “evolution” and so on, Pokemon doesn’t really use rules of real-world genetics! Instead, “evolution” is much more like another real biological phenomenon: life cycles. In this article, I discuss the standard evolution-by-level and the more unusual evolution-by-stone and how both of them compare to life cycles that exist in real world animals.