We respond to the preceding commentary ( Brower, 2016 ) regarding our “Inquiry & Investigation” articles ( Davenport et al., 2015a , b ) published recently in this journal. Our two articles describe a pair of activities, informed by biology education literature and national standards documents, whose primary goal is to help teachers assist introductory students in evaluating basic evolutionary datasets. In this short response to Brower's critique, we acknowledge that our activities, which address the complex field of systematics, contain simplifications and inaccuracies. At the same time, we hold that the activities are grounded in careful pedagogical decisions that allow students in general biology courses to readily understand major features of phylogenetic trees. We also argue that the design of the activities allows students to experience firsthand a vital component of the nature of science: prioritizing data when formulating a claim.

Phylogenetics has a central role in the biological sciences. We suggest a hands-on exercise to demonstrate the task of character coding and its importance in phylogenetic systematics. This exercise is appropriate for undergraduate students in life sciences and related courses. The teacher must provide a single group of masks in which color patterns, textures, and formats provide the characters to fill the data matrix. (The masks could be replaced by a set of other complex objects.) In this case, because there is no actual phylogeny, students will not be concerned with recovering the correct topology. Character coding is the aim of the exercise. After the character matrix is completed, a phylogenetic tree is drawn and the students interpret the evolution of a single character, starting from the common ancestor, based on the topological pattern of the tree and on the data matrix. In sequence, the students name and provide a full diagnosis for the group of masks as revealed by the topological pattern. The comparison between group results is also educational: there will be some common patterns between trees, but others will differ as in biological systematics.

Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution that leads to adaptations in species or populations. Phenotypes confer habitat-specific fitness consequences, which could lead to the evolution of similar strategies (convergence) or different strategies (divergence) within and across species. The evolution of communication is an example of convergent evolution in many cases. We describe a learning game that simulates the emergence of language and highlights differences between convergent and divergent evolution. With minor modifications, this game can also be used to illustrate phenotypic plasticity. During three preliminary trials, high school and university students representing different species developed novel strategies (languages) to solve the common problem of finding “Garrett,” a student who mimicked an essential resource. Naturally, there was a range of complexity and diversity among the strategies that emerged. We describe how the game can help illustrate evolutionary principles such as adaptation and natural selection.