S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection)

#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 This episode of Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. 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