Update on Grandmother Fish, and more to come

Grandmother Fish will be released in the US on September 6, and in the UK on October 13, by Feiwell and friends. That’s a division of Macmillan, like the Nature group who now also publish Scientific American. Good company, well deserved (full review here).

And more to come  from the same author-illustrator team; Clades, an animal-matching game with rules based on the underlying science.

Your chance to get involved: Kickstarter starts October 17th. Preliminary details in the August 15th entry on the Grandmother Fish Facebook page.

Why is this game important? Because of the one sentence in the book that I would strongly disagree with: “Evolution by natural selection is very difficult to understand because it doesn’t make intuitive sense.” I think that the main reason people think it is difficult is because there is an booming cottage industry in disinformation about evolution, and that the idea of clades, relationships through common descent, will make perfect intuitive sense to children who are, after all, familiar with exactly this in their own families.

Disclosure: I made some suggestions to Jonathan about family relationships among mammals. Which are actually quite difficult to sort out unambiguously, because of rapid radiation among placentals. So if anything in the family tree turns out to be wrong, the fault may well be mine.

And much more information for the adults (and, soon enough, the children):

And finally, a useful list of common misconceptions and how to correct them – but if you want to see that (and I hope you do), then buy the book for yourself.

Or for your grandchildren.