Origami‐Ancestry‐Test
Play it: testingthetree.com/origami-experiment · ~3 minutes
A short visual quiz that has nothing to do with paper folding and everything to do with how we judge ancestry from appearance alone.
You're shown one origami figure, mid-fold. Then four candidates. Exactly one of those four is a different step from the same fold sequence as the figure you were shown — a genuine relative, earlier or later in the same lineage. The other three are steps taken from completely unrelated designs, which just happen to look similar at that particular stage.
Your job: pick the real relative, not just the one that looks closest.
It's harder than it sounds. Mid-fold, an unrelated shape can look more similar to your target than its own actual next step does.
The app opens with a couple of quick questions about how strongly you already trust "things that look alike are probably related." There's no wrong answer — it's just there so you can compare your instincts going in against how the actual rounds go.
This is the core move behind a huge amount of tree-building: two species (or two proteins, or two structures) look similar, so we infer they're related. Usually that inference is solid. But "usually" isn't "always" — biology has plenty of real cases of convergence, where unrelated lineages land on similar-looking solutions independently, for reasons that have nothing to do with shared ancestry. This game is a fast, hands-on way to feel the difference between looks related and is related before you ever have to make that call with real data.
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