S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection)

Gaming with Science

#Evolution #NaturalSelection #Darwin #Competition #BoardGames #Science

Today we get down and dirty with Evolution, which is both a board game and that wonderful emergent property that happens when you have species competing for finite resources (including little food tokens on a game board). Joining us is a special evolutionary biologist guest, Dr. Thiago da Silva Moreira, who will help us walk through evolution, mutation, natural selection, sex, and other fun topics.

Find our socials at www.GamingWithScience.net

Timestamps

• 00:24 - Special guest host Thiago
• 01:26 - Spider milk!
• 03:34 - Basics of Evolution
• 13:37 - Evolutionary science
• 18:35 - Mutation
• 24:24 - Competition and the Red Queen's Race
• 29:38 - What is sex for?
• 33:30 - Final Grades
• 39:27 - Fun species names

Links:

• Evolution website (North Star Games)
• Original game (Right Games RGB)
• Spider milk!
• Red Queen Hypothesis
• Lamarck

Full Transcript

Brian 0:06
Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason 0:11
Today, we will be talking about Evolution by North Star games.

All right. Welcome back out everyone. This is Jason.

Brian 0:22
This is Brian.

Tiago 0:22
I am Thiago.

Jason 0:24
Yes, we have another special guest star. So this is Thiago. Moreira Thiago, can you please introduce yourself to our audience?

Tiago 0:29
Sure. I'm a, what I like to say, Brazilian by birth, American by choice. I'm a evolutionary biologist. I'm a professor here at the George Washington University. I have my graduation was back in Brazil in Rio. I got like a bachelor's in biology, a master's in zoology, and I have a PhD in evolutionary biology for the George Washington University too.

Jason 0:49
All right. And then we met last year at Fear the Con, which is a gaming convention in St Louis, for a different podcast that we both listen to Fear the Boot if anyone is also a fellow Booter out there. We want to get Thiago on here, because he is an actual evolutionary biologist. And although Brian and I, we work with evolution a lot, you can't work in biology without learning a lot about evolution. It is the glue that holds our discipline together. But it's nice to have someone who actually studies evolution for their career to come on and talk to us about Evolution, which is a great game, by the way. I do really enjoy Evolution, the board game. So, but before we get into that, now, Thiago, you told us that you had a fun science fact to share for today,

Tiago 1:26
Right! So the science fact that I found out, it was very interesting for me. So my specialty, what I do, my model organism, I use spiders to do my work on biology and evolution. One of the papers that I found recently that was not, it's not that recent, but was pretty stunning for me was one of 2018 when we found out, like Apparently, some spiders feed their younglings with milk.

Jason 1:50
Oh the spider milk story! I remember that.

Brian 1:54
That's awful.

Jason 1:56
What do you mean that's awful? That's what humans do.

Brian 2:00
No, no, actually, I pigeons use milk. Milk is more common than you'd think

Tiago 2:04
It is, actually, though, when I was reading about it and I was telling this in class to my students, I was making the case. It's not exactly like mammalian milk, which is kind of something very unique for mammalians, but they use milk in and as a very like liberal in a very liberal way. It's not that uncommon, if you think of like, a lot of like different invertebrates do that. But the finding out this, and using this, the way was used, was pretty stunning to see. I never heard about that in spiders. Spiders are mainly predators, so I mean, they hunt, and even the young spiders, they hunt since pretty often. So that was a particular Jumping Spider, we actually mimics an ant and like to find out this was really I wasn't expecting,

Jason 2:46
okay, so is the milk. I assume it's just some sort of liquid that's secreted from some gland on the spider that it feeds to its young. Is that right?

Tiago 2:53
Right, so spiders, they have, like the structure in their in the the abdomen, called like the the big gastric fur, which is a cup here that has the openings, and like, in that particular spot, they have some glandular they'll actually secrete some, like a liquid which is apparently highly nutritious. And the young, the first things that they eat is that liquid. And at some point they have, like, an alternation between eating that and start to hunt. And then when they're weaned off. They only do hunting,

Brian 3:22
Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense. You think, like spiders are very good at secreting proteins. That is something they do. It's the raw material for evolution to then adapt into a new function,

Tiago 3:33
yeah.

Jason 3:34
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 going to be talking about Evolution: Climate, which is sort of a an expansion, but also it's sold as a standalone. The primary reason is because that's the one we had access to without having to buy it, and so that's what we went with. But also, looking around, that also seems to be what many people consider to be one of the better versions. It's the one that usually see in stores. It has the highest rating and Board Game Geek so it's the one that people generally recommend if you're going to get a copy of it now. Now that said bidding for a game about evolution. This game has evolved into many different versions. It actually started as evolution, The Origin of Species, which was a card game made by a Russian scientist, a Russian teacher to teach his class about the process of evolution, and it got an expansion called random mutations, where you edit and stuff. Then North Star games got the rights for it in America. They got a professional Magic the Gathering player to help turn it into the American evolution game. And the illustrator, her mother was a rocket scientist at NASA, and her father was a neuroscientist. It's like the pedigree on this game is amazing. Anyway, that's how they made evolution. And then it got expansions for flight and climate, and then it also 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 version of it, which is supposed to be taking all their stuff. So the evolutionary tree of evolution is itself, kind of like, bifurcating and moving along down the way,

Tiago 5:02
has its own phylogeny, apparently.

Jason 5:05
Yes, it does. You can make the phylogenetic tree of evolution and show it's all family tree where everything comes from. Anyway, so evolution, climate, which is all we're gonna be talking about from now on, two to six players. It doesn't actually list time or age, but Board Game Geek puts it at about an hour to play, and probably ages 10 plus, which fits what my experience is. Currently. It retails for about $65 on North Star game's website, but there is actually a print and play version, so you can get the entire game as a PDF to print off yourself for $15

Brian 5:35
Wow.

Jason 5:35
This is the first major game I've seen actually do that. They also have the print and play conversion. So if you have the base evolution game, you can pay $5 just to get the climate expansion and print that off for yourself. So as far as physical components of the game, you have the watering hole, which is this board that goes in the middle, and that's where all the food goes. And then you have species cards, which track your little species that you are managing. And then the bulk of it are these beautifully illustrated trait cards, with things like horns or a hard shell or climbing or being a carnivore, and the watercolors on these are just gorgeous. So when you play the game, you get a bunch of these cards at the beginning of each turn, and then you spend them to get species. You spend them to grow your species, either size or population, or you put them down as actual traits on your species. And there's limits for how you can do those various things, and the idea is you're trying to eat as much as possible. Basically it's a victory point game. So you get victory points by eating food, which the game outright states is a proxy for evolutionary fitness that people use if you it's thought that if you eat more food, you are probably more evolutionary fit, because you're probably going to have more offspring. So the amount of food you eat over the course of the game is one way to earn points. Another is the size of your populations, basically just having a lot of animals around. And then the last one is the number of traits you have out at the end of the game, basically rewarding more diverse species that have more evolutionary traits on them. There is also a completely unnecessary and yet utterly fun dinosaur, meeple, that is the first player marker. And it's actually kind of at scale. So it's, it's about three and a half inches tall, nine centimeters on the metric side, which means, if you put it next to your normal meeple, like you get in like Carcassonne or other board games, a normal meeple only comes up to about its ankles or its knees. So it's actually like a scale dinosaur meeple, which I think is just awesome.

Brian 7:15
Yeah. What a great unnecessary detail

Jason 7:17
It is. And I love those little details anyway, as you play the game, you get the cards. You spend the cards in order to get these traits and things. And you're just trying to eat more food than everyone else. As your species start, they can't do much. They can maybe just take one food. Sometimes there's more food, sometimes there are less. You have a little bit of control over that. What climate adds over the base one is that it adds a climate track that will move every turn based on the cards you put down. And if it gets too hot or too cold, bad things happen to certain species. And there's other like random events that can trigger based off of that that have usually minor effects, although if you manage to hit the meteor event, that just makes it so no food gets generated the rest of the game. That's a pretty major effect. I've never yet managed to do that. I want to at some point, just to see how it plays out. But so far no.

Brian 8:00
The trait cards. Some of them seem to be based on real animals. Some of them seem like artistic interpretation. Did you find out anything about the trait cards themselves and their design, their artistic design?

Jason 8:10
I did not look into the artistic design. Most of them look like they're close to real animals. They're not quite real, but they're close enough you can see, okay, this is like the artist took this animal and this animal and this animal kind of squished them together to get this animal like pack hunting is one of my favorite cards to use. And it has these like dire calico, weasel bores. They're attacking a bunch of stuff.

Tiago 8:32
At least for me, they seem familiar, just the colors are all over the place, right?

Jason 8:37
They look like animals you could actually evolve

Tiago 8:39
Exactly. I love the the long neck one like a brontosaurus, but like, with the colors, completely different from what we're used to see in artistic definitions. Overall, I thought, I thought like the artwork for the board game is really remarkable.

Jason 8:51
I agree. And that's one of those things where, ultimately, the art is not necessary for a game, but it can really enhance the game. And I really like the art on this. I mean, it's the sort of thing I can see getting a print of one of these for a wall somewhere.

Tiago 8:57
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, like the game itself is very beautiful. For some reason I think like five print is not going to be the same. Well, that's me, but

Jason 9:14
yeah, it's definitely not going to be the same if you do the print and play. But that's kind of on the cheap, although I was thinking like, okay, by the time I print full color copies of all of these, and I'd probably want to put the cards in sleeves so that they actually have some substance to them. By that point, I'm probably spending 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 of the game. And the way the game plays out is that each turn, everyone makes their species and puts their traits, and you're competing for food. And this is where evolution actually comes into play. It's a little bit of ecology, little bit of evolution, because you are then responding to things over time. Since you're competing with other people, you're trying to put the traits down that make it better for you to get food. By default, each species can only grab one piece of food on each turn, and so it takes a long time to eat, but there are traits 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 they get food, obviously. But if you have the scavenging trait, then you also get another piece of food. And so the goal of the game is to try to build this up. You have a set of competition on the herbivore side of how can I eat food better? But then, of course, you have carnivores, and carnivores eat the herbivores. Every time your species gets eaten, you lose population, and it can go extinct. You can also go extinct if you just don't get enough food that turn. And so there's this constant give and flux of like, people trying to keep defenses so they don't get eaten, but also trying to eat the food better than their neighbor, and trying to get more species out so that you can get more victory points. But a new species is vulnerable because it usually doesn't have as many traits. And so it actually plays this whole evolutionary game a bit. And you get the sense of like, yes, as people play this thing, other people play things in response.

Brian 10:45
And with the climate edition, there's an extra element to it, right, not just competition 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 even more than I do, managed to send us into an ice age and kill most of 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, and have a perfect setup to exploit that. Let's talk a little bit about the idea of how you spend your cards for all the things you want to do to increase your population or your body size or get new species, or stuff like that. Like, cards are, are the currency 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 the one thing you have to spend. You don't have, like, three different pools you have to manage. You just you have cards. And you just have to choose, do I get a new species? Do I make my species bigger so it's harder to eat? Do I make my species more populous so it can eat more food? Or do I give it some sort of trait that will help me one 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 use certain abilities.

Tiago 11:49
And the cards itself, the ones that you choose to use as like, for the food pool, it might have like the similar card, but like with different food yields that you're going to give, and some of them add the complication of like, they're going to make the climate hotter or colder. So all of those play makes the game very complex in terms of, like, strategizing.

Jason 12:08
Yes, this has some deep gameplay. I mean, the rules are on the surface, very simple, but it can get very deep. There are also some interesting trade offs I noticed. So one thing you use these cards for is they help determine how much food goes in the watering hole at the beginning of each round, everyone puts a card down, face down, and then you later, you reveal them, and you tally it up. And that's also how the climate's determined. Noticeably, the cards that are generally best at getting you food are also the ones that put the most food in the watering hole. And so you have to choose, do I want there to be a lot of food to eat, or do I want to be better at getting it? Or one of the carnivore cards is the one that our friend used to slam us into the ice age because it has four points for going cold. But carnivores usually do better in cold temperatures because they need to be bigger anyway, which helps resist cold, and because other things are having to spend traits just to survive the climate, rather than to defend against the carnivore. And so you have to spend your carnivore card to get it in the place that is good for carnivores. So there's these trade offs you have 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 always best. You always have to make your choice,

Tiago 13:11
Which helps a lot of replayability and the different strategies and everything. So every 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 of things here. I mean, obviously there is evolution happening. That's why the game was created originally. But we also have competition among species, which gets a little bit into ecology, randomness and mutation, which is not so much present in this version of the game, but the original game did actually have a specific expansion to do that. And then Tiago hasn't heard this, and I don't know if Brian remembers this, but one of our interviewees from the maze meeting, which is the episode that will drop just before this, one of her professors had hacked the game to make it more random. Some people she played with don't like that, because it does take away your choices a little bit,

Tiago 13:52
Right? This game, like one of like the, I guess probably the most famous concepts, like in when everybody thinks about evolution, is probably adaptation, which is one of the core concepts of like this game works. But like, as you mentioned, Brian, like one of the things that is kind of like, not accurate, is the randomness of it. So you basically choose what adaptations to give to each one of the species. And in nature, that's not how it happens. Just is a crapshoot, right? So what you have at, and if you're lucky enough, you're going to get the right traits at the right time. I understand that's might be a choice in terms of, like, gameplay, which takes a little bit 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 reason why Candy Land and shoots and ladders are not top tier Board Game 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 do evolution in some format, and to be honest, they're all plagued with the same problem. It's always the player is making choices. Spore, the classic video game Spore, does this where you, your little creature, will go out and collect DNA traits that they then get to put onto their creature. It's fun. It's not very accurate, and to some degree, I haven't seen an evolution 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 a random process. Evolution does follow patterns, because it's mutation plus selection, and that selection is very much directional, yeah, you do have a little bit of the randomness, though. In the cards you get, there have definitely been entire games where I've never drawn a carnivore card. And so no matter how badly I want to make a carnivore, it just can't happen.

Tiago 15:27
Yeah, evolution is actually just change over time. The processes we have different processes. One of them is natural selection, which is not random at all. We have others who are very random mutations. Is the one of the random ones we have, like genetic drift, we have migration and so on and so forth. But I guess when you're trying to make a game take off like the agency of the player might not be, might not be that fun. So I guess are the choices that you make in terms of gameplay, I guess.

Jason 15:27
Yeah. Now I want to talk a little bit more about these other parts of evolution, because most people, when they think about evolution, you think Darwin, you think natural selection, and that's what evolution is. But no, they usually cover this on like one paragraph on high school biology. I'm like, no, no, there's other ways evolution can happen, and some of these are actually represented in the game. So the designers have actually gone on record saying that when you create a new species in the game, it's not just appearing from nowhere. The idea is that the world is actually much bigger. And this is the new species that is just wandered into this particular valley that has the watering hole. So that's migration going on, right there, right talk about some of these other mechanisms that go on that cause evolution to happen.

Tiago 16:32
Apart from natural selection, which is the most famous, there was a period that was proposed by Darwin and , which is like one of the guys who actually it's, it's been now brought on, like was often forgot, but the other processes that we could there are responsible for, like change over time in populations, which is what evolution is, or what we call genetic drift, which is really just the random assortment of like allele is what I usually call like the Powerball of nature, right? Sometimes random things happen, and sometimes those random things might be very significant, just the fluctuation of the different alleles of like, the genes who are in the population, not sometimes they change just base of random luck.

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

So like, if half of your group gets killed by a landslide, that was not a selective event, that just means half your genes are gone. And if your fittest individual, individuals were in that landslide, well, those genes are also gone. Tough luck.

Tiago 17:46
Precisely. That happens a lot. Basically, we're here because of my major genetic drift event, which was the meteorite extinct all the dinosaurs, or that, or animals in fact were, just like some burrowers, that looks a lot like the card burrowing for sort of saying because of like the extinction of dinosaurs, lot of different niches open to mammals to dominate Earth. But if wasn't for this drift event, this random event, who kills the dominate species on planet Earth at a time, we probably wouldn't be 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've covered natural selection, which is where you respond to, well, basically things that are less good at doing stuff die, and so you're only left with the things that are better at it. We've got drift, which is randomness.

Tiago 18:35
We have mutation, which is the only one of like those processes who actually can create something new. Out of the blue is something like, actually, is the major driving of variety in shape and form and physiology. And this is really random, so we don't know what kind of mutation we're going to have or like, and probably, if we 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 the rest are bad, and then a very small number of them are actually good.

Tiago 19:05
What I usually try to use as a explanation for my students, it's a sports metaphor. Imagine that you have a football team, right? And your team is winning. It has, like, I don't know, 10 victories in a row, but suddenly your quarterback got injured and you have to replace it with a random quarterback that you take out of the pool. What are the odds of like this actually being as good as or a better quarterback? Probably not that big. But hey, this guy might be, I don't know, Tom Brady, which you just drafted and put in it. It just might just work. Chances are, and in this case, you're going to have an even better team and they're going to keep winning. So that's more or less the logic of mutation, again, is a random chance of like something happens, probably most of the time, not going to be good for you, but when it does, natural selection takes care of like this being on for the next generation.

Jason 19:51
Yeah. And that's an important part about mutation being a force there, because one way you can get evolution is you can actually just get rid of natural selection. So if there is a trait that is important, and then suddenly the environment changes and it's no longer important, mutation will start eroding that trait away. Because what natural selection does is it basically kills the organisms that have worse versions of it. But if a worse version doesn't matter, suddenly that goes away. Good example in humans of this is wisdom teeth. So wisdom teeth were very important for our ancestors, as teeth were grinding down and they needed to come in and be there to help grind these very tough foods we had. But in populations that have historically been working with agriculture, more softer foods that didn't become as necessary, and so a lot of these human populations, that's why, if you have wonky wisdom teeth that came in sideways or didn't come in at all. You can thank the fact that your ancestors changed the evolutionary landscape, and now mutations are just slowly eroding those away, so that something 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 are winning. This is why, also why things in caves tend to lose their eyesight. I mean, there may be some minor selective advantage, but mostly it's just that the mutations are just slowly destroying the ability to make an eye, but because there's no benefit to having an eye in a cave, doesn't matter, the mutations 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 and adaptations is, as you said, Jason, like sometimes they might just not be make a difference, but sometimes, some of those mutations can start to bite you. We, as humans, we evolve as like an injurious run, and because we have, like, big brains, we need food all the time. Having adipose tissue actually help us to actually have this preserve 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 have that 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, fat tissue was a good thing for you, but nowadays we have, we live in a society where, like, food is easy to get, and like, we have highly processed food. So the capacity we have to accumulate fat, actually it's taking it so it's biting in the neck, because nowadays the accumulation of fat might actually bring us problems. So one thing that, like was was advantageous for us now is not in biology. Sometimes we call that. We call this, what we call an evolutionary trap or evolutionary mismatch.

Jason 22:14
Yeah, essentially, we have Neolithic genes, like our genes were evolved to the situation as it was 10, 20,000 years ago by and large, there are exceptions, but they have not evolved as fast as culture has, and so our modern society is out of sync with what our bodies are evolutionarily designed to do. Which actually brings up the next thing I want to bring, which is, is one of those scientists where I've got to feel sorry for him, because he's mostly known for getting it wrong. Which is Lamarck. Whenever you learn about evolution in grade school, you learn about Lamarck, who had the other idea, which is where trying to be a certain way, like the giraffe, stretching their necks made their offspring have longer necks. And that was passed along that way. And you know, we look at it now, and we have 200 years of evidence of natural selection, so now it seems a little silly, but at the time, it was a legit thing. It's like people didn't know how inheritance work. It seems as good a reason as any, and so I feel sorry for the guy for being wrong, but the fact is, that's actually more how the board game plays. Traits are evolved because you think it will help you, and so you play this, the trait down, and you alter your species in a way that will help you in the future. This is one of the great breaks with natural selection of the game. Is that defensive traits tend to evolve before carnivores do, because everyone knows if a carnivore shows up. No defense. Yes, yes. Like so you get hard shells and warning calls and horns all to defend if it's against the carnivore that is nowhere in the ecosystem, just in case it shows up.

Brian 23:37
Yeah, that doesn't. That doesn't really match up with what we've seen from like island ecosystems, 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 be adaptive, because it's an extra trait that has no reason to be it might be maintained just by random chance. Keep maintained, but like, there's no actual pressure to keep it. But most of the time, the traits that we have evolved because of pressure, especially the defensive one.

Brian 24:02
I do like trying to picture what some of these creatures look like, with the long neck and the shell and the climbing and burrowing. It's like, what is this thing exactly? I know we had some fun conversations about trying to make these traits fit together in some way that could possibly make sense, and sometimes they just don't.

Tiago 24:20
If those animals exist, it will probably be in Australia, because all the weird ones 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 teaching people the idea of evolution and natural selection, especially in response to competition, because basically, you're competing for limited resources, in this case, food, and so you keep evolving new traits to try to help you get that resource better. And the thing is, maybe this is because I'm a biologist. Once you understand how evolution works, you see evolution everywhere. I see evolution in everything I see I see it in YouTube channels as they're competing for our attention. I see them in companies as they're competing for our money, politicians as they're competing for energy and dedication and votes. You start seeing that, oh, all these things are competing, and what wins out is whatever is the best at getting that resource, not necessarily what is the best for what I want to happen.

Tiago 25:13
Yeah, so one of the things I like, I like to distinguish is, like the idea of evolution, which is just change over time, but like the competition selection is very driven and is really understanding was not random at all, as we mentioned. And yeah, we can see this happening in basically all aspects of society. Actually, one of the criticisms that Darwin made, Darwin was very focused on on the part of, like a sexual selection, which was the part of, like, the best ones who can attract best mates. Actually, is going to be more successful. One of the criticisms that he had was like, Oh, this guy's just bringing Victorian England to the animal kingdom. Because he was basically talking much about, like, sexual selection. The idea of competition is really strong, like in this game, it is basically the, the 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, you stay. If something works better, this replaces you. That actually was a theory in the 1970s called the Red Queen hypothesis. You guys 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 for resources, they must keep adapting to the environment and to adapt to themselves just in order to keep alive. And I probably was inspired by the political situation of time. He basically proposed, like, natural wars. Natural wars, and all the speakers are basically in a constant arms race just in order to survive.

Jason 26:56
Yeah, and the name Red Queen's race. So the Red Queen hypothesis comes from, I think it's through the looking glass, where Alice is talking to the Red Queen, who tells her that she has to run as fast as you can just to stay where she is. And that's the thing here. You have to keep evolving, because if you stop evolving, then everything else that's competing against you that has not stopped will overtake you. And this is, again, you see this in companies. You see this in politics. You see this everywhere. Once you once you start thinking this way, you see how it manifests all over the place.

Brian 26:56
We use the arms race analogy routinely when we're talking about the interactions between pathogens and their hosts.

Tiago 27:32
Yes, those relationships, host and pathogen, predator and prey. All of those relationships pretty much follow this logic same way, like symbiotic relationships too, and they drive what we also call co-evolution. Sometimes those relationships are so intertwined they basically drive the evolution of the other so the pathogen drives the evolution of the host and vice versa. The predator drives the evolution of the prey and vice versa. So those phenomena goes hand-in-hand, and I think that is the strongest point in this game, in terms of, like, how what they teach to actually to students like this dynamic is really well done in this game.

Jason 28:09
Yeah, because once you actually do have a predator show up, suddenly the defensive traits go way up, and then suddenly the predator has to get additional predatory traits in order to overcome those defensive traits. And you have the arms race going on, and the game controls it by saying you can only have so many traits on a species, which does limit it, because then suddenly, if you're super buff, Tanked Up, mega defensive, herding turtle that nothing can touch, you're still only going to be eating like one food a turn, you're going to lose. So it's, it's trade offs, which is another great thing about actual evolution, is there are trade offs. You cannot evolve infinitely in a direction, because eventually it will start impacting other things. Living organisms don't do one thing. We have to do a lot of things. And if you get so good at one that it impacts your ability to other stuff, evolution usually dings you, because you need to do a lot of things well in order to survive and leave offspring.

Tiago 28:56
Right, So there is this thing of like, you can't you cannot be a jack of all trade perfectly. At some point, something gotta give. The idea of like trade off is also like one is very persistent in evolutionary 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 to allocate to different functions of the body. We have to maintain ourselves. We have, like to think about reproduction, to acquire food, to defend ourselves. All of those have some energy costs that we had to allocate. I guess, the idea of, like you can only have four traits or three traits depending on how many players are in the game, is that it represents, well, this idea we cannot have a super, Uber animal or pretator or so.

Jason 29:38
There's one thing I want to talk about before we move on to grades, though, and I want to get back to what we were talking about, the red Queen's race and evolving. Because one thing people don't think about a lot is that we evolve a lot slower than our pathogens. So the diseases and the parasites that prey on humans, they're usually single cells or very small they have shorter lifespans. They actually evolve faster than us. And so a hypothesis. Thiago, can you vet, this? The hypothesis I've heard, is that sexual reproduction. So sex exists, in part, to help us evolve fast enough to keep up with the things that are trying to kill us.

Tiago 30:13
So well in part. So the idea of like sex, which is in biology, again, is the exchange of genetic material between two organisms. That's what sex means. Sex is not necessarily connected to sexual reproduction. We do have exchange of genetics between two organisms without necessarily resulting more organisms. For instance, that's very common in ciliate. They can do conjugation.

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 we have in some humans, we have evidence what, what we call HGT, or horizontal gene transfer, which means the the transfer between genes between in the same generation. We have evidence that we have some genes like they were transmitted by us, and like was passed through vector, but without getting too much into that, the idea of like sex as an evolutionary mechanism, actually, it's quite not well understood, as far as I know, why we have sex. Obviously, most of the living things that we know of don't, at least it's not obligated, right? But we do know that like sex helps in some in some things. For instance, let's say that I have a mutation that is really good, and, like Brian, has a mutation that is really good. Technically, if or lineages at some point cross and we reproduce sexually, technically, the genes that code my for my mutation can meet the genes that he had for his mutation, find out both of the good mutations in our offspring. So in theory, with sexual reproduction, you can have more good mutations getting away for the next generation faster than just by random chance. The same two good mutations happen in a organism that reproduces asexually which generates clone in the same pace, we can get rid of bad mutations easily, because to reproduction, maybe if I get a bad mutation, my my offensive not doesn't necessarily has to, because it can be purged off when my gametes were sent off again. All those processes are random, but like, it makes it easier. So felt since I called this the Mueller ratchet. Uh, Ratchet is like that kind of engine that, like, goes but like, it has like a system that cannot goes back.

Speaker 1 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 genetic exchange. If you get a mutation that is deleterious, it can get you in a Mueller's ratchet, because you cannot purge it away. You necessarily obligated to stay with it. That's a theory that that was proposed by this guy, Joseph Felsenstein, and the other hand, sexual reproduction can help you take this away from but again, there's lot of caveats with that. So obviously there's advantages and disadvantages of having sexual selection. And in the end, all the mutations and things that happen to us probably work for us, and that's why we stick with it, right? It's not about optimality. Sometimes it's just about what we get, and just we stick with it because it was working, 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 multicelluar organisms that have tissues, true tissues, and so on and so forth,

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 five or 10 minutes talking about why we have sex like they are completely 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 on gameplay and on science. We figured this is a part game review, part science education podcast, so we try to lean more towards the science education. I'll start with Brian here. So Brian, what do you think about the gameplay? Where would you put this?

Brian 33:46
In just in terms of gameplay, this is an A. Tons of replay value. I think we played this one preparing for this episode more than almost any game that we've played. We played it with multiple game groups, 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. I played the mobile version. It feels really good. It feels like a fun game to play. So I prefer to abstain in terms of the gameplay, I'll leave to you guys, because you guys actually play the real deal.

Jason 34:15
I'd go for A or maybe adding a little bit to A- territory. There's a few things I wish were a little better, and it's mostly because my experience as a beginning player was a bit negative, and maybe it's because I was going in a group where other people played it a lot, so I just got trounced. But it seems like a lot of the fun of this comes from the interactions and knowing which combinations go well together. But the first few times you play, you don't know that. And so if you're playing with people who know that, you don't, well, you're new to the evolutionary party, you don't have the good alleles, and you get 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 the kickstarter 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 the things we wish might be tweaked 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 is really good, like, the dynamics of adaptation and competition, and when you're talking about, even about the population dynamics, it was something that we didn't talk much about, it, like, when you have to play around, like the population size, body size, and like those ideas of like, how predation works, I think it plays really well. I think is a good tool. And it's easy to use this game to explain those concepts to somebody who don't know much about evolution or evolutionary processes. But there's some things though I would like to see maybe a little tweak. One of the things that like I would like to see was a list an optional mechanics about, like, having, like, the random adaptations to have it randomized. And one of the things that I was talking to Brian a little before you arrived, Jason was like, I felt a little offended that was very vertebrate-centric. It would be fun to try to have something kind of like a an invertebrate route, or even a plant route to see. Like, how would you do? How would you play if you were, like, I have a plant organism or a photosynthetic organism, right? So I don't know how feasible be in terms of gameplay, of how much complexity will add to it, but like, it'll be fun to see

Brian 35:07
Jason and I are both plant biologists. Look, plants are not just here to be food. Plants don't like being eaten. They have their own adaptations and defenses against being eaten. Most plants are really noxious 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 sort of mash photosynthesis and this together, so you have the plants versus animals. And so the plants are evolving to try to capture as much sunlight and resources and making these seeds as they can while defending themselves against the animals who are evolving to eat them and each other and everything has to deal with climate. Yeah, that'd be a very complicated game, but I 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 give plants their due?

Jason 36:55
I don't know. It talks about having modules, though, so it's apparently, like you pick which modules you're going to play with, and that determines the nature of the game. And I don't know much more of that, so I 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 a B, maybe a B+, because as the player, you are playing a nature God, there's really no other way to look at this. You are controlling the climate. You are creating species and adding traits that you think will be beneficial, saying when they exist and when they maybe not when they get killed. But you're the one who gets to bring new things to the valley to experience competition, just from that perspective of the directionality of it. I don't I don't love that. I think the climate track should be random. I don't think that's something you should get to decide as the player. I think that that could just be a dice roll, which it's probably just going to end up towards the mean. And maybe that's the problem with that. But to be honest, that tends to happen anyway, because whenever the climate would get pushed in one direction, one nature God would 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. So those who don't know, Richard Dawkins is a famous and very brilliant evolutionary biologist who is equally famous for being brilliant evolutionary biologist and radical atheist, so he would probably not approve of the implied like nature deities going on here. And we're not going to get into that, because this is not a show about 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 selection in culture, that is a concept that was originated by Richard Dawkins. Of course, memes, like all elements of culture, have now 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 same reasons. I think overall, there are some things that are not quite 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 bolts of how evolution works, and especially how you react to other species and such. I think it does a decent job of that basic level. So I would call this, like the middle school, high school level evolution introduction. And for that, I think it does a really good job if you're going to go up to, like undergraduate or anything else, that's when it starts breaking from reality. But for the middle school, high school level of evolutionary knowledge, I think it works just fine.

Brian 39:27
There's one more thing I want to give a shout out to that I didn't even know about. I saw it when we came to play, and that is the Latin names for your different could you? Could you talk on that for a second? I just don't want that to go unmentioned, because it's such a fun 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 to the species. And as a taxonomist, which is somebody whose primary work is to describe species, I like it a lot. And nitpicking thing was, like, was not in italics. It's supposed to but like, it's not,

Jason 39:58
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 species option. You're supposed to pick one from each but like the ambush one, the genus name is ninja or hibernation. The species name is Van Winkle, long neck. You have Extendo stretcher. It's like, these are fun names for the traits. They had a lot of fun with this. And I've got to say, the designers obviously had fun, because there's a few little things. There's a few science facts scattered among stuff, which is nice. There's also just a few little nods that they had fun, like they called the little dinosaur Meeple is the and I quote, "incredibly awesome first player token". Oh, another fun thing, the official method for determining ties, so you count up the victory points, and if that is a tie, then there's something else. And if that is still a tie, the official way of solving 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. Thank you very much, Tiago for coming on like this has been really fun. It was fun playing with you at Fear the Con last year. It's fun 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 reach you?

Tiago 41:12
I do have Facebook, but like, usually, basically, to to rant about my soccer team back in Brazil. And I don't use X and I don't like Not, not really don'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 for listening. Thank you Tiago for joining us, and everyone, have a good 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 reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those with the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.