Selection and Evolution with a Deck of Cards

Imparting a basic understanding of evolutionary principles to students in an active, engaging fashion can be troublesome because the logistics involved in designing experiments where students pose their own questions and use the data to test alternative hypotheses often outstrip time and financial constraints. In recent years, educators have begun publishing exercises that teach evolution using innovative, in-class experiments. This article adds to this growing forum by describing a classroom exercise that introduces the concept of evolution by natural selection in a hypothesis-driven, experimental fashion, using a deck of cards. Our standard exercise is suitable for upper-level high school and introductory biology students at the college level. In this paper, we discuss the exercise in detail and give several examples that illustrate how our games provide accessible bridges to the primary literature. Finally, we discuss how extensions of our basic exercise can be used to effectively teach advanced evolutionary concepts.