S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection) - Gaming with Science

Episode Transcript
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Unknown (00:00):
Music.

Brian (00:06):
Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast
where we talk about the sciencebehind some of your favorite
games.

Jason Wallace (00:11):
Today, we will be talking about evolution by North
Star games.
All right. Welcome back outeveryone. This is Jason.

Brian (00:22):
This is Brian.

Tiago (00:22):
I am Thiago.

Jason (00:24):
Yes, we have another special guest star. So this is
Thiago. Moreira Thiago, can youplease introduce yourself to our

Tiago (00:29):
Sure. I'm a, what I like to say, Brazilian by birth,
audience?
American by choice. I'm aevolutionary biologist. I'm a
professor here at the GeorgeWashington University. I have my
graduation was back in Brazil inRio. I got like a bachelor's in
biology, a master's in zoology,and I have a PhD in evolutionary
biology for the GeorgeWashington University too.

All right. And then we met last year at Fear
the Con, which is a gamingconvention in St Louis, for a
different podcast that we bothlisten to Fear the Boot if
anyone is also a fellow Booterout there. We want to get Thiago
on here, because he is an actualevolutionary biologist. And
although Brian and I, we workwith evolution a lot, you can't
work in biology without learninga lot about evolution. It is the
glue that holds our disciplinetogether. But it's nice to have

(01:12):
someone who actually studiesevolution for their career to
come on and talk to us aboutEvolution, which is a great
game, by the way. I do reallyenjoy Evolution, the board game.
So, but before we get into that,now, Thiago, you told us that
you had a fun science fact toshare for today,

Tiago (01:26):
Right! So the science fact that I found out, it was
very interesting for me. So myspecialty, what I do, my model
organism, I use spiders to do mywork on biology and evolution.
One of the papers that I foundrecently that was not, it's not
that recent, but was prettystunning for me was one of 2018
when we found out, likeApparently, some spiders feed

(01:48):
their younglings with milk.

Jason (01:50):
Oh the spider milk story! I remember that.

Brian (01:54):
That's awful.

Jason (01:56):
What do you mean that's awful? That's what humans do.

Brian (02:00):
No, no, actually, I pigeons use milk. Milk is more
common than you'd think

Tiago (02:04):
It is, actually, though, when I was reading about it and
I was telling this in class tomy students, I was making the
case. It's not exactly likemammalian milk, which is kind of
something very unique formammalians, but they use milk in
and as a very like liberal in avery liberal way. It's not that
uncommon, if you think of like,a lot of like different

(02:25):
invertebrates do that. But thefinding out this, and using
this, the way was used, waspretty stunning to see. I never
heard about that in spiders.Spiders are mainly predators, so
I mean, they hunt, and even theyoung spiders, they hunt since
pretty often. So that was aparticular Jumping Spider, we
actually mimics an ant and liketo find out this was really I
wasn't expecting,

okay, so is the milk. I assume it's just some
sort of liquid that's secretedfrom some gland on the spider
that it feeds to its young. Isthat right?

Tiago (02:53):
Right, so spiders, they have, like the structure in
their in the the abdomen, calledlike the the big gastric fur,
which is a cup here that has theopenings, and like, in that
particular spot, they have someglandular they'll actually
secrete some, like a liquidwhich is apparently highly
nutritious. And the young, thefirst things that they eat is

(03:14):
that liquid. And at some pointthey have, like, an alternation
between eating that and start tohunt. And then when they're
weaned off. They only dohunting,

Brian (03:22):
Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense. You think, like
spiders are very good atsecreting proteins. That is
something they do. It's the rawmaterial for evolution to then
adapt into a new function,

Tiago (03:33):
yeah.

Jason (03:34):
And I think that gives us the perfect segueway to actually
talk about this game Evolution.So quick, basics about the game,
for those who are not familiar.So evolution by North Star
games, we're specifically goingto be talking about Evolution:
Climate, which is sort of a anexpansion, but also it's sold as
a standalone. The primary reasonis because that's the one we had
access to without having to buyit, and so that's what we went

(03:54):
with. But also, looking around,that also seems to be what many
people consider to be one of thebetter versions. It's the one
that usually see in stores. Ithas the highest rating and Board
Game Geek so it's the one thatpeople generally recommend if
you're going to get a copy of itnow. Now that said bidding for a
game about evolution. This gamehas evolved into many different
versions. It actually started asevolution, The Origin of

(04:14):
Species, which was a card gamemade by a Russian scientist, a
Russian teacher to teach hisclass about the process of
evolution, and it got anexpansion called random
mutations, where you edit andstuff. Then North Star games got
the rights for it in America.They got a professional Magic
the Gathering player to helpturn it into the American
evolution game. And theillustrator, her mother was a

(04:36):
rocket scientist at NASA, andher father was a neuroscientist.
It's like the pedigree on thisgame is amazing. Anyway, that's
how they made evolution. Andthen it got expansions for
flight and climate, and then italso got a spin off, a kids
version, and then a video game.And then it had a spin off about
the oceans, and then next year,they're coming out with nature,
which is, like the next versionof it, which is supposed to be

(04:56):
taking all their stuff. So theevolutionary tree of evolution
is itself, kind of like,bifurcating and moving along
down the way,

Tiago (05:02):
has its own phylogeny, apparently.

Jason (05:05):
Yes, it does. You can make the phylogenetic tree of
evolution and show it's allfamily tree where everything
comes from. Anyway, soevolution, climate, which is all
we're gonna be talking aboutfrom now on, two to six players.
It doesn't actually list time orage, but Board Game Geek puts it
at about an hour to play, andprobably ages 10 plus, which
fits what my experience is.Currently. It retails for about

(05:26):
$65 on North Star game'swebsite, but there is actually a
print and play version, so youcan get the entire game as a PDF
to print off yourself for $15
This is the first major game I've seen actually do that.

Brian (05:35):
Wow.
They also have the print andplay conversion. So if you have
the base evolution game, you canpay $5 just to get the climate
expansion and print that off foryourself. So as far as physical
components of the game, you havethe watering hole, which is this
board that goes in the middle,and that's where all the food
goes. And then you have speciescards, which track your little
species that you are managing.And then the bulk of it are

(05:57):
these beautifully illustratedtrait cards, with things like
horns or a hard shell orclimbing or being a carnivore,
and the watercolors on these arejust gorgeous. So when you play
the game, you get a bunch ofthese cards at the beginning of
each turn, and then you spendthem to get species. You spend
them to grow your species,either size or population, or
you put them down as actualtraits on your species. And

(06:18):
there's limits for how you cando those various things, and the
idea is you're trying to eat asmuch as possible. Basically it's
a victory point game. So you getvictory points by eating food,
which the game outright statesis a proxy for evolutionary
fitness that people use if youit's thought that if you eat
more food, you are probably moreevolutionary fit, because you're
probably going to have moreoffspring. So the amount of food
you eat over the course of thegame is one way to earn points.

(06:40):
Another is the size of yourpopulations, basically just
having a lot of animals around.And then the last one is the
number of traits you have out atthe end of the game, basically
rewarding more diverse speciesthat have more evolutionary
traits on them. There is also acompletely unnecessary and yet
utterly fun dinosaur, meeple,that is the first player marker.
And it's actually kind of atscale. So it's, it's about three

(07:01):
and a half inches tall, ninecentimeters on the metric side,
which means, if you put it nextto your normal meeple, like you
get in like Carcassonne or otherboard games, a normal meeple
only comes up to about itsankles or its knees. So it's
actually like a scale dinosaurmeeple, which I think is just
awesome.
Yeah. What a great unnecessary detail

Jason (07:17):
It is. And I love those little details anyway, as you
play the game, you get thecards. You spend the cards in
order to get these traits andthings. And you're just trying
to eat more food than everyoneelse. As your species start,
they can't do much. They canmaybe just take one food.
Sometimes there's more food,sometimes there are less. You
have a little bit of controlover that. What climate adds
over the base one is that itadds a climate track that will

(07:37):
move every turn based on thecards you put down. And if it
gets too hot or too cold, badthings happen to certain
species. And there's other likerandom events that can trigger
based off of that that haveusually minor effects, although
if you manage to hit the meteorevent, that just makes it so no
food gets generated the rest ofthe game. That's a pretty major
effect. I've never yet managedto do that. I want to at some

(07:57):
point, just to see how it playsout. But so far no.

Brian (08:00):
The trait cards. Some of them seem to be based on real
animals. Some of them seem likeartistic interpretation. Did you
find out anything about thetrait cards themselves and their
design, their artistic design?

Jason (08:10):
I did not look into the artistic design. Most of them
look like they're close to realanimals. They're not quite real,
but they're close enough you cansee, okay, this is like the
artist took this animal and thisanimal and this animal kind of
squished them together to getthis animal like pack hunting is
one of my favorite cards to use.And it has these like dire
calico, weasel bores. They'reattacking a bunch of stuff.

Tiago (08:32):
At least for me, they seem familiar, just the colors
are all over the place, right?

Jason (08:37):
They look like animals you could actually evolve

Tiago (08:39):
Exactly. I love the the long neck one like a
brontosaurus, but like, with thecolors, completely different
from what we're used to see inartistic definitions. Overall, I
thought, I thought like theartwork for the board game is
really remarkable.

Jason (08:51):
this. I mean, it's the sort of thing I can see getting
a print of one of these for awall somewhere.

Tiago (08:57):
This is a game that I would like advise you to buy,
because it's very well made.Like it, like all the things, is
very well designed, and, likethe game itself is very
beautiful. For some reason Ithink like five print is not
going to be the same. Well,that's me, but

Jason (09:14):
yeah, it's definitely not going to be the same if you do
the print and play. But that'skind of on the cheap, although I
was thinking like, okay, by thetime I print full color copies
of all of these, and I'dprobably want to put the cards
in sleeves so that they actuallyhave some substance to them. By
that point, I'm probablyspending 30 or 40 bucks to make
it playable how I wanted anyway,so I might as well buy the full
game. So that's the basics ofthe game. And the way the game

(09:35):
plays out is that each turn,everyone makes their species and
puts their traits, and you'recompeting for food. And this is
where evolution actually comesinto play. It's a little bit of
ecology, little bit ofevolution, because you are then
responding to things over time.Since you're competing with
other people, you're trying toput the traits down that make it
better for you to get food. Bydefault, each species can only
grab one piece of food on eachturn, and so it takes a long

(09:56):
time to eat, but there aretraits that will let it so, oh,
when I take this piece of food,I get to get another one or. If
a carnivore attacks, then theyget food, obviously. But if you
have the scavenging trait, thenyou also get another piece of
food. And so the goal of thegame is to try to build this up.
You have a set of competition onthe herbivore side of how can I
eat food better? But then, ofcourse, you have carnivores, and
carnivores eat the herbivores.Every time your species gets

(10:18):
eaten, you lose population, andit can go extinct. You can also
go extinct if you just don't getenough food that turn. And so
there's this constant give andflux of like, people trying to
keep defenses so they don't geteaten, but also trying to eat
the food better than theirneighbor, and trying to get more
species out so that you can getmore victory points. But a new
species is vulnerable because itusually doesn't have as many
traits. And so it actually playsthis whole evolutionary game a

(10:40):
bit. And you get the sense oflike, yes, as people play this
thing, other people play thingsin response.

Brian (10:45):
And with the climate edition, there's an extra
element to it, right, not justcompetition with other species,
but responding to the climate.

Jason (10:53):
Yes, we found that out the hard way when our friend who
likes messing with people evenmore than I do, managed to send
us into an ice age and kill mostof the species on the board and
then ate the remaining ones.

Brian (11:04):
Yeah, basically set himself up to tank the climate
into the most coldest state, andhave a perfect setup to exploit
that. Let's talk a little bitabout the idea of how you spend
your cards for all the thingsyou want to do to increase your
population or your body size orget new species, or stuff like
that. Like, cards are, are thecurrency that you use.

Jason (11:23):
Yeah, and I like that. They are basically the core part
of it. They're the one currency.Like, everything comes down to
your trait cards. They're theone thing you have to spend. You
don't have, like, threedifferent pools you have to
manage. You just you have cards.And you just have to choose, do
I get a new species? Do I makemy species bigger so it's harder
to eat? Do I make my speciesmore populous so it can eat more
food? Or do I give it some sortof trait that will help me one

(11:43):
way or another?

Brian (11:44):
Or do you I need to keep some cards in my hand because I
have to spend them to usecertain abilities.

Tiago (11:49):
And the cards itself, the ones that you choose to use as
like, for the food pool, itmight have like the similar
card, but like with differentfood yields that you're going to
give, and some of them add thecomplication of like, they're
going to make the climate hotteror colder. So all of those play
makes the game very complex interms of, like, strategizing.

Jason (12:08):
Yes, this has some deep gameplay. I mean, the rules are
on the surface, very simple, butit can get very deep. There are
also some interesting trade offsI noticed. So one thing you use
these cards for is they helpdetermine how much food goes in
the watering hole at thebeginning of each round,
everyone puts a card down, facedown, and then you later, you
reveal them, and you tally itup. And that's also how the
climate's determined.Noticeably, the cards that are

(12:28):
generally best at getting youfood are also the ones that put
the most food in the wateringhole. And so you have to choose,
do I want there to be a lot offood to eat, or do I want to be
better at getting it? Or one ofthe carnivore cards is the one
that our friend used to slam usinto the ice age because it has
four points for going cold. Butcarnivores usually do better in
cold temperatures because theyneed to be bigger anyway, which

(12:50):
helps resist cold, and becauseother things are having to spend
traits just to survive theclimate, rather than to defend
against the carnivore. And soyou have to spend your carnivore
card to get it in the place thatis good for carnivores. So
there's these trade offs youhave to make, which I think is
not think is nice.

Brian (13:03):
So you're always making some kind of difficult choice,

Jason (13:06):
Yes, which is what the best Eurogames do. There's no
one single thing that is alwaysbest. You always have to make
your choice,

Tiago (13:11):
Which helps a lot of replayability and the different
strategies and everything. Soevery game is very unique, which
makes it very fun.

Jason (13:17):
Yeah. So now, in terms of the actual science represented
in the game. There's a lot ofthings here. I mean, obviously
there is evolution happening.That's why the game was created
originally. But we also havecompetition among species, which
gets a little bit into ecology,randomness and mutation, which
is not so much present in thisversion of the game, but the
original game did actually havea specific expansion to do that.

(13:38):
And then Tiago hasn't heardthis, and I don't know if Brian
remembers this, but one of ourinterviewees from the maze
meeting, which is the episodethat will drop just before this,
one of her professors had hackedthe game to make it more random.
Some people she played withdon't like that, because it does
take away your choices a littlebit,

Tiago (13:52):
Right? This game, like one of like the, I guess
probably the most famousconcepts, like in when everybody
thinks about evolution, isprobably adaptation, which is
one of the core concepts of likethis game works. But like, as
you mentioned, Brian, like oneof the things that is kind of
like, not accurate, is therandomness of it. So you
basically choose whatadaptations to give to each one

(14:14):
of the species. And in nature,that's not how it happens. Just
is a crapshoot, right? So whatyou have at, and if you're lucky
enough, you're going to get theright traits at the right time.
I understand that's might be achoice in terms of, like,
gameplay, which takes a littlebit of the science.

Jason (14:29):
Yeah, it's mostly, it's not fun to not be able to
choose. I mean, there's a reasonwhy Candy Land and shoots and
ladders are not top tier BoardGame Geek rankings

Tiago (14:38):
or the Russian one for I don't know.

Brian (14:39):
I think that there are multiple video games and
everything that try to doevolution in some format, and to
be honest, they're all plaguedwith the same problem. It's
always the player is makingchoices. Spore, the classic
video game Spore, does thiswhere you, your little creature,
will go out and collect DNAtraits that they then get to put
onto their creature. It's fun.It's not very accurate, and to

(15:01):
some degree, I haven't seen anevolution game that doesn't sort
of have this intrinsic problem.

Jason (15:06):
Yeah, well, that's because evolution is not a
random process. Mutation is arandom process. Evolution does
follow patterns, because it'smutation plus selection, and
that selection is very muchdirectional, yeah, you do have a
little bit of the randomness,though. In the cards you get,
there have definitely beenentire games where I've never
drawn a carnivore card. And sono matter how badly I want to
make a carnivore, it just can'thappen.

Tiago (15:27):
Yeah, evolution is actually just change over time.

Jason (15:27):
Yeah. Now I want to talk a little bit more about these
The processes we have differentprocesses. One of them is
natural selection, which is notrandom at all. We have others
other parts of evolution,because most people, when they
who are very random mutations.Is the one of the random ones we
have, like genetic drift, wehave migration and so on and so
forth. But I guess when you'retrying to make a game take off
like the agency of the playermight not be, might not be that

(15:50):
fun. So I guess are the choicesthat you make in terms of
gameplay, I guess.
think about evolution, you thinkDarwin, you think natural
selection, and that's whatevolution is. But no, they
usually cover this on like oneparagraph on high school
biology. I'm like, no, no,there's other ways evolution can
happen, and some of these areactually represented in the

(16:12):
game. So the designers haveactually gone on record saying
that when you create a newspecies in the game, it's not
just appearing from nowhere. Theidea is that the world is
actually much bigger. And thisis the new species that is just
wandered into this particularvalley that has the watering
hole. So that's migration goingon, right there, right talk
about some of these othermechanisms that go on that cause
evolution to happen.

Tiago (16:32):
Apart from natural selection, which is the most
famous, there was a period thatwas proposed by Darwin and
Wallace, which is like one ofthe guys who actually it's, it's
been now brought on, like wasoften forgot, but the other
processes that we could thereare responsible for, like change
over time in populations, whichis what evolution is, or what we
call genetic drift, which isreally just the random

(16:54):
assortment of like allele iswhat I usually call like the
Powerball of nature, right?Sometimes random things happen,
and sometimes those randomthings might be very
significant, just thefluctuation of the different
alleles of like, the genes whoare in the population, not
sometimes they change just baseof random luck.

Jason (17:11):
Yeah. So an allele is just a variation on a gene, and
so different alleles are whatgive like some people blue eyes
and some people brown eyes, orwhat makes some snakes green and
others yellow. It's just, it's avariation on a gene that changed
it. And, yeah, it's a crapshoot.Sometimes you'll have a group
that just happens to have all ofone allele, or sometimes just by
random nature of one just risesto prominence. It's not helping

(17:34):
any it just happens to do so.
So like, if half of your groupgets killed by a landslide, that
was not a selective event, thatjust means half your genes are
gone. And if your fittestindividual, individuals were in
that landslide, well, thosegenes are also gone. Tough luck.

Tiago (17:46):
Precisely. That happens a lot. Basically, we're here
because of my major geneticdrift event, which was the
meteorite extinct all thedinosaurs, or that, or animals
in fact were, just like someburrowers, that looks a lot like
the card burrowing for sort ofsaying because of like the
extinction of dinosaurs, lot ofdifferent niches open to mammals
to dominate Earth. But if wasn'tfor this drift event, this

(18:09):
random event, who kills thedominate species on planet Earth
at a time, we probably wouldn'tbe here.

Brian (18:15):
I think we need a better term than genetic drift for a
meteor smashing into the earth.Genetic Smash.

Tiago (18:21):
Yeah.

Jason (18:22):
All right. So look, we've covered migration, which is
where just things move in. We'vecovered natural selection, which
is where you respond to, well,basically things that are less
good at doing stuff die, and soyou're only left with the things
that are better at it. We've gotdrift, which is randomness.

Tiago (18:35):
We have mutation, which is the only one of like those
processes who actually cancreate something new. Out of the
blue is something like,actually, is the major driving
of variety in shape and form andphysiology. And this is really
random, so we don't know whatkind of mutation we're going to
have or like, and probably, ifwe have one, we're probably not
going to be as good as it is.

Jason (18:57):
Yeah, most mutations are really a lot of them don't
really do anything. Most of therest are bad, and then a very
small number of them areactually good.

Tiago (19:05):
What I usually try to use as a explanation for my
students, it's a sportsmetaphor. Imagine that you have
a football team, right? And yourteam is winning. It has, like, I
don't know, 10 victories in arow, but suddenly your
quarterback got injured and youhave to replace it with a random
quarterback that you take out ofthe pool. What are the odds of

(19:25):
like this actually being as goodas or a better quarterback?
Probably not that big. But hey,this guy might be, I don't know,
Tom Brady, which you justdrafted and put in it. It just
might just work. Chances are,and in this case, you're going
to have an even better team andthey're going to keep winning.
So that's more or less the logicof mutation, again, is a random
chance of like somethinghappens, probably most of the

(19:46):
time, not going to be good foryou, but when it does, natural
selection takes care of likethis being on for the next
generation.

Jason (19:51):
Yeah. And that's an important part about mutation
being a force there, because oneway you can get evolution is you
can actually just get rid ofnatural selection. So if there
is a trait that is important,and then suddenly the
environment changes and it's nolonger important, mutation will
start eroding that trait away.Because what natural selection
does is it basically kills theorganisms that have worse

(20:13):
versions of it. But if a worseversion doesn't matter, suddenly
that goes away. Good example inhumans of this is wisdom teeth.
So wisdom teeth were veryimportant for our ancestors, as
teeth were grinding down andthey needed to come in and be
there to help grind these verytough foods we had. But in
populations that havehistorically been working with
agriculture, more softer foodsthat didn't become as necessary,

(20:34):
and so a lot of these humanpopulations, that's why, if you
have wonky wisdom teeth thatcame in sideways or didn't come
in at all. You can thank thefact that your ancestors changed
the evolutionary landscape, andnow mutations are just slowly
eroding those away, so thatsomething that used to be very
important to keep now, isn't it,so if it goes wrong, it's not a
big deal, and the mutations arewinning. This is why, also why
things in caves tend to losetheir eyesight. I mean, there

(20:56):
may be some minor selectiveadvantage, but mostly it's just
that the mutations are justslowly destroying the ability to
make an eye, but because there'sno benefit to having an eye in a
cave, doesn't matter, themutations start winning.

Brian (21:07):
So in the game, this is chucking a trait card,

Jason (21:10):
Basically, yeah.

Tiago (21:11):
One of the things that I found interesting about
sometimes, uh, mutations andadaptations is, as you said,
Jason, like sometimes they mightjust not be make a difference,
but sometimes, some of thosemutations can start to bite you.
We, as humans, we evolve as likean injurious run, and because we
have, like, big brains, we needfood all the time. Having
adipose tissue actually help usto actually have this preserve

(21:33):
energy.

Jason (21:34):
And adipose tissue is the fancy term for fat.

Tiago (21:36):
Exactly and accumulating fat. It was good for us in those
times because we didn't havethat much food around the
savannas. Hunter and gatherer,life was hard. So if we can
accumulate food, which is,actually is one of the traits
that we have in this game, fattissue was a good thing for you,
but nowadays we have, we live ina society where, like, food is
easy to get, and like, we havehighly processed food. So the

(21:57):
capacity we have to accumulatefat, actually it's taking it so
it's biting in the neck, becausenowadays the accumulation of fat
might actually bring usproblems. So one thing that,
like was was advantageous for usnow is not in biology. Sometimes
we call that. We call this, whatwe call an evolutionary trap or
evolutionary mismatch.

Jason (22:14):
Yeah, essentially, we have Neolithic genes, like our
genes were evolved to thesituation as it was 10, 20,000
years ago by and large, thereare exceptions, but they have
not evolved as fast as culturehas, and so our modern society
is out of sync with what ourbodies are evolutionarily
designed to do. Which actuallybrings up the next thing I want
to bring, which is, is one ofthose scientists where I've got

(22:34):
to feel sorry for him, becausehe's mostly known for getting it
wrong. Which is Lamarck.Whenever you learn about
evolution in grade school, youlearn about Lamarck, who had the
other idea, which is wheretrying to be a certain way, like
the giraffe, stretching theirnecks made their offspring have
longer necks. And that waspassed along that way. And you
know, we look at it now, and wehave 200 years of evidence of

(22:54):
natural selection, so now itseems a little silly, but at the
time, it was a legit thing. It'slike people didn't know how
inheritance work. It seems asgood a reason as any, and so I
feel sorry for the guy for beingwrong, but the fact is, that's
actually more how the board gameplays. Traits are evolved
because you think it will helpyou, and so you play this, the
trait down, and you alter yourspecies in a way that will help

(23:15):
you in the future. This is oneof the great breaks with natural
selection of the game. Is thatdefensive traits tend to evolve
before carnivores do, becauseeveryone knows if a carnivore
shows up. No defense. Yes, yes.Like so you get hard shells and
warning calls and horns all todefend if it's against the
carnivore that is nowhere in theecosystem, just in case it shows

(23:37):
up.

Brian (23:37):
Yeah, that doesn't. That doesn't really match up with
what we've seen from like islandecosystems, it's typically the
opposite.

Tiago (23:43):
Basically, if you don't have the pressure for something,
there's no reason for this to beadaptive, because it's an extra
trait that has no reason to beit might be maintained just by
random chance. Keep maintained,but like, there's no actual
pressure to keep it. But most ofthe time, the traits that we
have evolved because ofpressure, especially the
defensive one.

Brian (24:02):
I do like trying to picture what some of these
creatures look like, with thelong neck and the shell and the
climbing and burrowing. It'slike, what is this thing
exactly? I know we had some funconversations about trying to
make these traits fit togetherin some way that could possibly
make sense, and sometimes theyjust don't.

Tiago (24:20):
If those animals exist, it will probably be in
Australia, because all the weirdones are there.

Jason (24:24):
That is true. So talking about this game, there was one
thing I wanted to bring up,which is, I do think this game
is really valuable for teachingpeople the idea of evolution and
natural selection, especially inresponse to competition, because
basically, you're competing forlimited resources, in this case,
food, and so you keep evolvingnew traits to try to help you
get that resource better. Andthe thing is, maybe this is

(24:45):
because I'm a biologist. Onceyou understand how evolution
works, you see evolutioneverywhere. I see evolution in
everything I see I see it inYouTube channels as they're
competing for our attention. Isee them in companies as they're
competing for our money,politicians as they're competing
for energy and dedication andvotes. You start seeing that,
oh, all these things arecompeting, and what wins out is

(25:07):
whatever is the best at gettingthat resource, not necessarily
what is the best for what I wantto happen.

Tiago (25:13):
Yeah, so one of the things I like, I like to
distinguish is, like the idea ofevolution, which is just change
over time, but like thecompetition selection is very
driven and is reallyunderstanding was not random at
all, as we mentioned. And yeah,we can see this happening in
basically all aspects ofsociety. Actually, one of the
criticisms that Darwin made,Darwin was very focused on on

(25:34):
the part of, like a sexualselection, which was the part
of, like, the best ones who canattract best mates. Actually, is
going to be more successful. Oneof the criticisms that he had
was like, Oh, this guy's justbringing Victorian England to
the animal kingdom. Because hewas basically talking much
about, like, sexual selection.The idea of competition is
really strong, like in thisgame, it is basically the, the

(25:56):
strongest point in terms of,like, teachable teachability, if
that's a word I don't know

Brian (26:01):
It is now.

Tiago (26:02):
but it is really helpful to teach anybody about, like how
competition natural world works,like we have a limited set of
resources, which is here,simplified to food, and you need
to be better at acquiring it.The natural selection algorithm
is simple. If it works, youstay. If something works better,
this replaces you. That actuallywas a theory in the 1970s called

(26:25):
the Red Queen hypothesis. Youguys heard about this before?

Brian (26:29):
Yes, yeah, the one that originally comes from Alice in
Wonderland, right?

Tiago (26:32):
Yes. So there was this ecologist called Leigh Van
Valen, and he postulated that,like all species, especially the
ones who are competing forresources, they must keep
adapting to the environment andto adapt to themselves just in
order to keep alive. And Iprobably was inspired by the
political situation of time. Hebasically proposed, like,
natural wars. Natural wars, andall the speakers are basically

(26:53):
in a constant arms race just inorder to survive.

Jason (26:56):
Yeah, and the name Red Queen's race. So the Red Queen

Brian (26:56):
We use the arms race analogy routinely when we're
hypothesis comes from, I thinkit's through the looking glass,
where Alice is talking to theRed Queen, who tells her that
she has to run as fast as youcan just to stay where she is.
And that's the thing here. Youhave to keep evolving, because
if you stop evolving, theneverything else that's competing
against you that has not stoppedwill overtake you. And this is,

(27:17):
again, you see this incompanies. You see this in
politics. You see thiseverywhere. Once you once you
start thinking this way, you seehow it manifests all over the
place.
talking about the interactionsbetween pathogens and their
hosts.

Tiago (27:32):
Yes, those relationships, host and pathogen, predator and
prey. All of those relationshipspretty much follow this logic
same way, like symbioticrelationships too, and they
drive what we also callco-evolution. Sometimes those
relationships are so intertwinedthey basically drive the
evolution of the other so thepathogen drives the evolution of

(27:52):
the host and vice versa. Thepredator drives the evolution of
the prey and vice versa. Sothose phenomena goes
hand-in-hand, and I think thatis the strongest point in this
game, in terms of, like, howwhat they teach to actually to
students like this dynamic isreally well done in this game.

Jason (28:09):
Yeah, because once you actually do have a predator show
up, suddenly the defensivetraits go way up, and then
suddenly the predator has to getadditional predatory traits in
order to overcome thosedefensive traits. And you have
the arms race going on, and thegame controls it by saying you
can only have so many traits ona species, which does limit it,
because then suddenly, if you'resuper buff, Tanked Up, mega

(28:29):
defensive, herding turtle thatnothing can touch, you're still
only going to be eating like onefood a turn, you're going to
lose. So it's, it's trade offs,which is another great thing
about actual evolution, is thereare trade offs. You cannot
evolve infinitely in adirection, because eventually it
will start impacting otherthings. Living organisms don't
do one thing. We have to do alot of things. And if you get so
good at one that it impacts yourability to other stuff,

(28:51):
evolution usually dings you,because you need to do a lot of
things well in order to surviveand leave offspring.

Tiago (28:56):
Right, So there is this thing of like, you can't you
cannot be a jack of all tradeperfectly. At some point,
something gotta give. The ideaof like trade off is also like
one is very persistent inevolutionary studies. It is very
well represented here by like,what you just said, the idea
that like, something gotta give.We just have a limited amount of
resources that we have toallocate to different functions

(29:17):
of the body. We have to maintainourselves. We have, like to
think about reproduction, toacquire food, to defend
ourselves. All of those havesome energy costs that we had to
allocate. I guess, the idea of,like you can only have four
traits or three traits dependingon how many players are in the
game, is that it represents,well, this idea we cannot have a
super, Uber animal or pretatoror so.

Jason (29:38):
There's one thing I want to talk about before we move on
to grades, though, and I want toget back to what we were talking
about, the red Queen's race andevolving. Because one thing
people don't think about a lotis that we evolve a lot slower
than our pathogens. So thediseases and the parasites that
prey on humans, they're usuallysingle cells or very small they

(29:58):
have shorter lifespans. Theyactually evolve faster than us.
And so a hypothesis. Thiago, canyou vet, this? The hypothesis
I've heard, is that sexualreproduction. So sex exists, in
part, to help us evolve fastenough to keep up with the
things that are trying to killus.

Tiago (30:13):
So well in part. So the idea of like sex, which is in
biology, again, is the exchangeof genetic material between two
organisms. That's what sexmeans. Sex is not necessarily
connected to sexualreproduction. We do have
exchange of genetics between twoorganisms without necessarily
resulting more organisms. Forinstance, that's very common in

(30:34):
ciliate. They can doconjugation.

Jason (30:37):
They're bacteria. Basically?

Tiago (30:38):
No, they're not bacteria. Ciliates are like protists. Oh,
so, so very simple, single cell,single cell organisms, but like
a eukaryotic one, but and wehave in some humans, we have
evidence what, what we call HGT,or horizontal gene transfer,
which means the the transferbetween genes between in the
same generation. We haveevidence that we have some genes

(30:59):
like they were transmitted byus, and like was passed through
vector, but without getting toomuch into that, the idea of like
sex as an evolutionarymechanism, actually, it's quite
not well understood, as far as Iknow, why we have sex.
Obviously, most of the livingthings that we know of don't, at
least it's not obligated, right?But we do know that like sex

(31:19):
helps in some in some things.For instance, let's say that I
have a mutation that is reallygood, and, like Brian, has a
mutation that is really good.Technically, if or lineages at
some point cross and wereproduce sexually, technically,
the genes that code my for mymutation can meet the genes that
he had for his mutation, findout both of the good mutations
in our offspring. So in theory,with sexual reproduction, you

(31:42):
can have more good mutationsgetting away for the next
generation faster than just byrandom chance. The same two good
mutations happen in a organismthat reproduces asexually which
generates clone in the samepace, we can get rid of bad
mutations easily, because toreproduction, maybe if I get a
bad mutation, my my offensivenot doesn't necessarily has to,

(32:05):
because it can be purged offwhen my gametes were sent off
again. All those processes arerandom, but like, it makes it
easier. So felt since I calledthis the Mueller ratchet. Uh,
Ratchet is like that kind ofengine that, like, goes but
like, it has like a system thatcannot goes back.

Unknown (32:19):
It's like a gear with a little Locky mechanism, so it
can only go in one direction.

Tiago (32:23):
Exactly. He mentioned the like asexual reproduction, the
reproduction without geneticexchange. If you get a mutation
that is deleterious, it can getyou in a Mueller's ratchet,
because you cannot purge itaway. You necessarily obligated
to stay with it. That's a theorythat that was proposed by this
guy, Joseph Felsenstein, and theother hand, sexual reproduction
can help you take this away frombut again, there's lot of

(32:46):
caveats with that. So obviouslythere's advantages and
disadvantages of having sexualselection. And in the end, all
the mutations and things thathappen to us probably work for
us, and that's why we stick withit, right? It's not about
optimality. Sometimes it's justabout what we get, and just we
stick with it because it wasworking, and we don't mess much
with what is winning.

Brian (33:05):
Yeah, obligate sexual reproduction is pretty
restricted in the tree of life.

Tiago (33:09):
It is. It's pretty much restricted to like metazoans,
which means the multicelluarorganisms that have tissues,
true tissues, and so on and soforth,

Jason (33:18):
Animals, essentially.

Tiago (33:19):
Yeah,

Jason (33:19):
I can just imagine what our listeners are thinking. So
these scientists just spent fiveor 10 minutes talking about why
we have sex like they arecompletely out of touch.
Obviously,

Brian (33:29):
we're gonna be canceled.

Jason (33:30):
All right, let's move on to grades. So Tiago, we try to
grade the games, both ongameplay and on science. We
figured this is a part gamereview, part science education
podcast, so we try to lean moretowards the science education.
I'll start with Brian here. SoBrian, what do you think about
the gameplay? Where would youput this?

Brian (33:46):
In just in terms of gameplay, this is an A. Tons of
replay value. I think we playedthis one preparing for this
episode more than almost anygame that we've played. We
played it with multiple gamegroups, and I would play it
right now if we were together.

Tiago (33:58):
In terms of gameplay. I don't know if I can say much,
because I did not play the game.I didn't have the chance of
playing the tabletop game. Iplayed the mobile version. It
feels really good. It feels likea fun game to play. So I prefer
to abstain in terms of thegameplay, I'll leave to you
guys, because you guys actuallyplay the real deal.

Jason (34:15):
I'd go for A or maybe adding a little bit to A-
territory. There's a few thingsI wish were a little better, and
it's mostly because myexperience as a beginning player
was a bit negative, and maybeit's because I was going in a
group where other people playedit a lot, so I just got
trounced. But it seems like alot of the fun of this comes
from the interactions andknowing which combinations go
well together. But the first fewtimes you play, you don't know

(34:38):
that. And so if you're playingwith people who know that, you
don't, well, you're new to theevolutionary party, you don't
have the good alleles, and youget eaten. So I wish that were a
little bit better. But overall,I think, yes, this is solid. I
would happily own this game.It's going on our list. I would
happily play it again.

Brian (34:53):
One of us is going to have to pull the trigger and
just buy this game.

Jason (34:56):
I may hold out for nature. I put myself on the list
to be notified when thekickstarter begins.

Brian (35:00):
Okay, that's fair.

Jason (35:02):
All right. Now, how about science? So this is where we can
also talk about some of thethings we wish might be tweaked

Brian (35:07):
Jason and I are both plant biologists. Look, plants
a little bit.

Tiago (35:07):
I think, in terms of solid science, I'll give it an
A-, A solid a mine, I think isreally good, like, the dynamics
of adaptation and competition,and when you're talking about,
even about the populationdynamics, it was something that
are not just here to be food.Plants don't like being eaten.
we didn't talk much about, it,like, when you have to play
around, like the populationsize, body size, and like those
ideas of like, how predationworks, I think it plays really

(35:28):
well. I think is a good tool.And it's easy to use this game
to explain those concepts tosomebody who don't know much
about evolution or evolutionaryprocesses. But there's some
things though I would like tosee maybe a little tweak. One of
the things that like I wouldlike to see was a list an
optional mechanics about, like,having, like, the random
adaptations to have itrandomized. And one of the

(35:48):
things that I was talking toBrian a little before you
arrived, Jason was like, I felta little offended that was very
vertebrate-centric. It would befun to try to have something
kind of like a an invertebrateroute, or even a plant route to
see. Like, how would you do? Howwould you play if you were,
like, I have a plant organism ora photosynthetic organism,
right? So I don't know howfeasible be in terms of

(36:09):
gameplay, of how much complexitywill add to it, but like, it'll
be fun to see
They have their own adaptationsand defenses against being
eaten. Most plants are reallynoxious or poisonous and have
lots of ways of not being eaten.

Jason (36:27):
You know that could be a really fun like asymmetric
variation of this is if you sortof mash photosynthesis and this
together, so you have the plantsversus animals. And so the
plants are evolving to try tocapture as much sunlight and
resources and making these seedsas they can while defending
themselves against the animalswho are evolving to eat them and
each other and everything has todeal with climate. Yeah, that'd

(36:48):
be a very complicated game, butI think it'd be fun.

Brian (36:50):
Is that what nature's gonna be? Is that what this new
game, is it gonna actually giveplants their due?

Jason (36:55):
I don't know. It talks about having modules, though, so
it's apparently, like you pickwhich modules you're going to
play with, and that determinesthe nature of the game. And I
don't know much more of that, soI really hope that there's some
sort of plant module in there.But if not, maybe we'll have to
house rule it.

Brian (37:09):
Let's do just plants and arthropods. These vertebrates
get too much attention.
Let's see. So I think I'm on aB, maybe a B+, because as the
player, you are playing a natureGod, there's really no other way
to look at this. You arecontrolling the climate. You are
creating species and addingtraits that you think will be
beneficial, saying when theyexist and when they maybe not

(37:30):
when they get killed. But you'rethe one who gets to bring new
things to the valley toexperience competition, just
from that perspective of thedirectionality of it. I don't I
don't love that. I think theclimate track should be random.
I don't think that's somethingyou should get to decide as the
player. I think that that couldjust be a dice roll, which it's
probably just going to end uptowards the mean. And maybe
that's the problem with that.But to be honest, that tends to

(37:53):
happen anyway, because wheneverthe climate would get pushed in
one direction, one nature Godwould push it back the other
way,

Jason (37:59):
Unless you have our friend Kyle who just wanted to
destroy everything,

Brian (38:03):
Who just wants to see things burn or freeze,

Tiago (38:06):
Seems like a lovely person.

Brian (38:08):
He really is, though.

Jason (38:10):
So you basically, I'm going to call say that you have
the Richard Dawkins nitpick. Sothose who don't know, Richard
Dawkins is a famous and verybrilliant evolutionary biologist
who is equally famous for beingbrilliant evolutionary biologist
and radical atheist, so he wouldprobably not approve of the
implied like nature deitiesgoing on here. And we're not
going to get into that, becausethis is not a show about

(38:30):
religion.

Tiago (38:31):
but a fun fact. He created the word meme.

Brian (38:33):
He did so a lot of that stuff that Jason was talking
about, about natural selectionin culture, that is a concept
that was originated by RichardDawkins. Of course, memes, like
all elements of culture, havenow vastly changed their meaning
from their original intention.

Jason (38:47):
All right, we need to wrap this up. So I'm just gonna
say, I'll put mine in the A, A-range, kind of same as Thiago
and for basically the samereasons. I think overall, there
are some things that are notquite evolution by natural
selection, which is, in theory,what it's supposed to be
representing, on the other hand,as an introductory board game to
understanding the nuts and boltsof how evolution works, and
especially how you react toother species and such. I think

(39:10):
it does a decent job of thatbasic level. So I would call
this, like the middle school,high school level evolution
introduction. And for that, Ithink it does a really good job
if you're going to go up to,like undergraduate or anything
else, that's when it startsbreaking from reality. But for
the middle school, high schoollevel of evolutionary knowledge,
I think it works just fine.

Brian (39:28):
There's one more thing I want to give a shout out to that
I didn't even know about. I sawit when we came to play, and
that is the Latin names for yourdifferent could you? Could you
talk on that for a second? Ijust don't want that to go
unmentioned, because it's such afun little easter egg to drop
into the game.

Tiago (39:42):
Oh, yeah. So they have a list they have kind of like, how
to give the scientific names tothe species. And as a
taxonomist, which is somebodywhose primary work is to
describe species, I like it alot. And nitpicking thing was,
like, was not in italics. It'ssupposed to but like, it's not,

Oh, come on! Give 'em a break.

Tiago (40:03):
I think was really great. I think was a good effort.

Jason (40:06):
And I mean, the names for these are really fun. So you
have a genus and a speciesoption. You're supposed to pick
one from each but like theambush one, the genus name is
ninja or hibernation. Thespecies name is Van Winkle, long
neck. You have Extendostretcher. It's like, these are
fun names for the traits. Theyhad a lot of fun with this. And
I've got to say, the designersobviously had fun, because

(40:26):
there's a few little things.There's a few science facts
scattered among stuff, which isnice. There's also just a few
little nods that they had fun,like they called the little
dinosaur Meeple is the and Iquote, "incredibly awesome first
player token". Oh, another funthing, the official method for
determining ties, so you countup the victory points, and if
that is a tie, then there'ssomething else. And if that is

(40:46):
still a tie, the official way ofsolving it is to order pizza and
play again.

Tiago (40:52):
I like that.

Jason (40:53):
All right, so we need to wrap this up. These are too much
fun to talk about, though. Thankyou very much, Tiago for coming
on like this has been reallyfun. It was fun playing with you
at Fear the Con last year. It'sfun having you on.

Tiago (41:03):
My pleasure. And if you dare call me again, I'll
probably show up.

Brian (41:08):
Do you? Do you have socials, or any way that you'd
like someone to be able to reachyou?

Tiago (41:12):
I do have Facebook, but like, usually, basically, to to
rant about my soccer team backin Brazil. And I don't use X and
I don't like Not, not reallydon't have that much social
media presence.

Jason (41:23):
Okay, so many of us scientists are soo bad at social
media, really? Yeah, all right,with that, we're gonna wrap it
up. Thank you everyone forlistening. Thank you Tiago for
joining us, and everyone, have agood week and happy gaming.

Brian (41:33):
Have fun playing dice with the universe.

Tiago (41:35):
Goodbye.

Jason (41:38):
This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright
2024 listeners are free to reusethis recording for any non
commercial purpose, as long ascredit is given to gaming with
science. This podcast isproduced with support from the
University of Georgia. Allopinions are those with the
hosts and do not implyendorsement by the sponsors. If
you wish to purchase any of thegames we talked about, we
encourage you to do so throughyour friendly local game store.

(41:59):
Thank you and have fun playingdice with the universe.

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S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection)