S2E10 - Nature (Evolution redux)

#NatureGame #NorthStarGames #Evolution #Ecology #Predators #BoardGames #Science #SciComm

Summary

Welcome to Nature, the next evolution of Evolution! We're joined once again by Dr. Thiago Moreira to talk about this reimagining of a popular game, including covering a lot of evolutionary territory we couldn't last time. We'll talk about why everything isn't actually turning into crabs, why anteater-ification needs to be a word, how humans shape evolution from moths to elephants, what exactly a species is and where they come from, and why there's no such thing as "more evolved" creatures, (at least among anything still alive).

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introductions
• 02:14 Better DNA preservation
• 05:00 Bird-hunting tortoise
• 06:54 Basics of Nature
• 16:23 Evolution in a nutshell
• 18:30 Convergent evolution
• 27:42 Human-induced evolution
• 34:22 Species and speciation
• 40:52 Evolution toward simplicity
• 45:49 Final grades

Links

• Nature Web Site (North Star Games) 
• Preserving DNA with EDTA (Phys.org) 
• Video of tortoise hunting a bird (YouTube) 
  
  

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This episode of Gaming with Science™ was 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

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

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

Jason  0:10  
Today, we will be talking about nature by North Star games. Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Jason.

Brian  0:18  
This is Brian. 

Thiago  0:19  
I'm Thiago

Jason  0:20  
again, Thiago, so y'all may remember Tiago Moreira from our episode on evolution back in season one. He is back with us today to talk about nature, which is the next evolution of evolution. So Thiago, can you give our listeners a quick refresh on who you are and what your background is? 

Thiago  0:38  
Hi, of course. My name is Thiago Moreira, I'm a assistant professor of honors and biology at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I do have a background in zoology, and my PhD was in evolutionary biology, and my object of studies are spiders. 

Brian  0:54  
So Tiago has the questionable honor of being our first returning guest.

Jason  1:00  
All right, we're going to assume that is a high honor. 

Thiago  1:03  
I consider an honor. 

Jason  1:05  
And Tiago, I don't know if we asked you this the first time, but we're making it a habit to ask our guests what their favorite game is. What's your favorite game?

Thiago  1:13  
Tabletop game? 

Jason  1:14  
Sure. 

Brian  1:14  
Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be. 

Thiago  1:17  
I get into the habit of like playing tabletop games, like board games later. So like, as a gamer, my favorite was always role playing games. And I'm from Brazil, and in Brazil at the time that I was a kid, we didn't have DND officially there, so we have others. So like, I play some very old school ones, but I guess the one that marked my teenage years and young adult years more was like Vampire the Masquerade. 

Jason  1:43  
Oh, okay, I never played that one, but I did play several other of white wolf's Orpheus is my personal favorite. 

Thiago  1:49  
Okay,

Brian  1:50  
so you were sort of in the sort of 90s renaissance of indie tabletop roleplay 

Thiago  1:54  
kind of, yeah.

Jason  1:56  
So did you like, have cape and fangs and all that sort of stuff?

Thiago  2:01  
I never do the the live action was, it's always tabletop, like, always rolling dice and like, that's it.

Brian  2:07  
That seems like a shame, Tiago, because I think you'd make a pretty good vampire.

Thiago  2:12  
I tried once. Didn't work.

Brian  2:13  
 Okay,

Jason  2:14  
well, let's move on to our fun science fact. Tiago, as our guest, you get to go first. What do you have for us from the world of science. 

Thiago  2:21  
So I got this news the other day, like and like something that is probably going to be very influential in what I do. I'm a systematic person, so I do work with systematics, trying to uncover the tree of life. And we use a lot of molecular data. And this was this news from, apparently, people in Northwestern University, they found something that actually preserves DNA better than actually what we use currently, which is ethanol. So apparently when they use EDTA, which is a food preserver, it actually preserved the DNA samples more efficiently than actually ethanol,

Brian  2:57  
just like a suspension, like a solution of EDTA?

Thiago  3:00  
Yeah, they made a kind of solution to it. And actually, they found this by accident, apparently. So they just got a sample that fell in there, like, and apparently it works. Apparently it says here that, like, they got some samples from fish in ddta, and they obtain high quality DNA in large quantity. So they just pull up something from a food preservative. And it works really well. 

Jason  3:21  
That's interesting, because in my graduate work, we work with RNA, so DNA is less stable, more interesting cousin, and we always had to use EDTA, because what the chemical does is it binds metal ions, and it basically keeps them from interacting with the RNA or the DNA. That's what kind of makes it fall apart. RNA is tricky to work with, because that one difference of the one hydrogen, or, sorry, the one oxygen. So the deoxy in deoxyribonucleic acid, that makes a huge difference in chemical stability. And if there are metal ions around, the RNA will actually cleave itself. And there's all sorts of proteins around that are meant to break apart RNA, because it's meant to be temporary. You literally sweat RNAses, they're called, enzymes designed to tear apart RNA, so it's tricky to work with, and we'd use EDTA to keep them intact. I'm just surprised that it works so well on DNA. I would have expected that degradation would still happen, and I guess not 

Brian  4:16  
A lot of the enzymes that cut DNA as well. Nucleases generally need these metal cofactors as well. DNA stores information, but it is a chemical, right? So what we do is we keep it at a buffer that keeps it at slightly basic so that it improves stability, and then you suck up all of the metal ions, so the enzymes that would cut it up can't do that.

Jason  4:35  
I'm just surprised it works better than ethanol, which basically dehydrates everything, so nothing can work.

Thiago  4:40  
Yeah, that was surprising as well. I personally didn't during my PhD, but like some of my lab colleagues, they would, they were working with transcriptome, so they do have to work with, like, a RNA and like, the whole extraction was like painful, the whole rituals, especially when they have, like, to preserve the specimens in the field to do it. It was not fun.

Jason  4:59  
How about you, Brian, you also had a science fact right?

Brian  5:03  
 I did okay. So based on the game and what we're going to talk about later, I heard about this story first, actually, from Will and David from Common Descent, while we were at Dragon Con, we had a panel called, "Are you really going to eat that?" which was about unusual dietary habits in the animal world. So for instance, alligators will pursue and eat fruit actively, it's not an accident. They will actually eat it if it's available. This is a story from Current Biology in 2021 it's a correspondence so it's not a full length paper documenting a tortoise hunting, killing, and eating a baby bird. 

Brian  5:36  
So herbivores eat what?

Thiago  5:39  
they're very opportunistic. Apparently, like those turtles, 

Brian  5:42  
carnivores eat meat, herbivores eat plants. But an herbivore will be happy to take meat if it is available, and lots of things will basically eat baby birds if they have the opportunity. They are very helpless, not very good at protecting themselves. And this is an instance of a tortoise on an island group that is just on the west of Africa. And it's a video of a tortoise just hunting this baby tern chick that fell out of the nest, sort of slowly backing away as the tortoise slowly walks toward it, trying to bite it, trying to bite it, until it eventually bites its head and kills it and eats it. So we can have a video of that if you're interested in watching a tortoise hunt and eat a baby chick.

Thiago  6:19  
that tortoise like was not known to eating meat before?

Brian  6:22  
No, I think that they've been scavenging. Yes, and evidently, this is not the only time that this has been observed, but this is the first time it's been documented from the process of actively hunting, killing and eating.

Jason  6:35  
There are also some very horrifying videos online of horses eating baby chicks around farms. So there's a lot of things that will eat meat if you give them the opportunity. It turns out,

Brian  6:45  
yeah, things will eat eggs, and things will definitely eat baby birds if they have the opportunity to do so. I guess birds primarily have to defend themselves by flying. Baby birds are not going to be able to do that.

Jason  6:54  
This actually ties very into the game, so we're now going to transition to the game itself, because the game actually has a card called opportunistic which lets your foragers, your herbivores start eating some meat. So let's jump into this game. So the game for today is nature by North Star games. It is basically the next evolution of the game, evolution which we covered back in season one, basic stats of the game. It's for one to four players, although there are very easy optional rules to extend it up to six, ages 10 plus 30 to 45 minutes for the base game, and about a suggested retail price of $35 Wow, that's good, yeah. The thing about nature is we make the joke that nowadays, whenever you release a game, you already have the first three expansions planned. Nature went beyond that. They made the game modular. So it is meant to have these other module expansions added on. They had the first five modules launched with the original Kickstarter, and the idea is that you mix and match these. Each one provides a slightly different style of play. Each of those is about another 20 to 25 bucks, and you can see from a gameplay it provides a lot of replayability because you can mix things around. You can customize it to what you want. But let's be honest, also from the business point of view. This lets them continue to make expansions for the next 10 years and release one to two every year as a constant stream of income. 

Brian  7:40  
So it's games as service.

Thiago  8:08  
Its the DLC of like tabletop games?

Brian  8:13  
Is there actually? Can you subscribe to just get the next module? Did they have a system like that in place?

Jason  8:19  
Yes, and it's called Kickstarter. Okay, no, actually, as we're recording this, they just launched the Kickstarter for the sixth module, like yesterday or the day before. Okay, so that's the climate module, which is the inheritance of Nature Climate, which is what we did, the sorry, evolution climate, which we did the first time around.

Brian  8:37  
You had mentioned that they had taken a poll of the community to see what modules people were prioritizing. And I was happy to hear that the ones about fantasy creatures, people were not too generally interested in that, right?

Jason  8:49  
Yes, they looks like they did a poll to ask which other modules should we make in the future. And they had all sorts of things I'm looking over now. It's got like microbes, plants, the Cretaceous era, the Stone Age, but they also have things like flying dragons, cryptids, fantasy animals and such. All the fantastical ones, the ones that don't actually exist, pretty much pulled dead last so it looks like the fans of nature want things to keep to the real world nature theme.

Brian  9:14  
Hooray. Those are my people. I appreciate that. I just okay. Look, if you want to go play your fantasy games, there are endless options, right?

Thiago  9:21  
Let nature geeks be nature geeks,

Jason  9:23  
yeah. So the first five of them are flight, which I actually got to test out. It builds itself as for players who want to avoid conflict because there's more resources your species literally fly away when they're full, so they can't be hunted. Jurassic, which makes giant things and helps with hunting. It's for people want to feel invincible. Natural disasters, which is a bunch of random stuff that happens. Arctic tundra. Didn't read the rules much on this, but it's for players who love a challenge. So I think it's basically hard mode. And Amazon rainforest, which has bluffing and surprises. I think basically there's the question of, are you poisonous if I eat you? I don't know until I try and. Yeah, climate, which they're just kickstarting right now. So each of these is meant to change a little bit. We're going to be primarily focusing on the core nature game, and maybe mention some of the modules in passing. But mostly we're talking about nature itself, which is this core engine around which the other things are meant to go and it's kind of obvious it is meant to be the core and is meant to be added on to you can play it by itself. But from the beginning, it's pretty obvious that the creators intend you to be able to add these various modules on. 

Brian  10:26  
Yeah. I think you said there's only, like, eight different power cards that you can add eight different traits. That's it, right in the base game.

Jason  10:32  
 Yeah, we'll get to that. So that what the game consists of is you have a central watering hole, which is where all the plant food goes. Everyone has their species, which is represented by a little spin dial that shows your size, and then some little tokens that represent how many population that species has. And then your trait cards, which, as with evolution, these are what determine the traits your species has to attack, to defend, to get food better. And yes, in the core nature game, there are only eight unique cards, or nine, if you happen to get the Kickstarter off of it, and most modules only add five additional ones, so there's not that much variation in the core game. Adding even one module adds significantly more. If you add two, suddenly you're playing an entirely different game, almost because of how much change there is. 

Thiago  10:32  
I was telling Jason that I didn't have the chance of playing with another person I played the app. 

Brian  11:19  
Oh, cool, 

Thiago  11:20  
yeah. And like, I saw like, a video about, like, how the play with the tabletop game works, the video that is on North Star website. And I don't know if we want to talk about this right now, but like, I saw a lot of similarities about, like, some concepts from nature and evolution,

Jason  11:38  
yeah, this is definitely a refinement and reimagining of the core evolution game. It is not an entirely new game. You have a very similar thing, where at the beginning of each turn you put food out, you draw cards in this game, you get a new species automatically instead of having to pay for it. Then you go through the adaptation phase, where you play various cards out from your hand. The cards are, once again, beautifully illustrated this time. They are of real creatures, not of fantastic, but realistic ones. And actually, all of them have a little science fact at the bottom.

Thiago  12:09  
 It has to do flavor text, 

Jason  12:10  
yeah, a little fact, and it's usually about the creature that is shown on there. So we were talking about the opportunistic card earlier. It shows a red panda stealing some eggs. And a bit of the bottom is talking about how red pandas are opportunistic, and it lets them be able to survive better, etc. The goal is to eat as much food as possible, which can be plant food or can be meat. Your species all start as foragers. You can play cards on them that make them opportunistic, or scavengers, so they can eat meat based off of certain events that will happen. Or you can play the hunter card, which, unlike evolution, is always available. So there's a stack of Hunter cards you can take. They're double sided, so you can't hide them face down. What you do with most traits at the start? And then you actually flip your size dial over, so it goes from a green forager to a red Hunter. So it's very obvious whenever that happens, everyone can see that as with evolution, defensive traits tend to appear before there's actually hunters to hunt them, just in case, because no one likes being hunted. And the idea is that over the course of four rounds, game only lasts four rounds, you eat as much food as possible, either from the plants in the center, or from these opportunistic things, or from hunting other species. And it's, again, a bit of an engine building game. You get the right combinations of cards together, you can easily do one feeding action and get 6,7,8, food off of it, which actually happened several times while we were playing the game. At the end of the game, whoever ate the most food wins. Basically, there are some minor bonus points for each species you still have surviving that didn't starve to death or that didn't get hunted to extinction, but that's actually relatively minor. Most of the points comes from the food itself, and that's basically the overview. So if you've played evolution, you're about 80% of the way towards playing nature and vice versa. We're not going to go into a lot of details on the individual differences. We're going to focus more on the science that cover it, basically,

Brian  13:56  
I think. So one thing I did want to mention is that, again, this game has been made incredibly I'm trying to all of the friction points have been removed. Everything's been sanded off. If your creature dies out for some reason, if it's driven extinct, right? There's a mechanic there where you you're never losing resources. The traits go back to your hand, even if your creature gets eaten, that population then rolls on to your next species. And if you get wiped out, you get to add the size to the next species. I think that there are, at least to some degree, this is reflected in the metaphor that we're going to get into later. But I really appreciate that it's like you never really, you're never really going to fall behind. You know, you don't for an evolution game. I think it would be very easy to get to the point where, if you're playing against like a Jason, for instance, he's built some impressive, crazy engine, and everybody gets wiped out and you have nothing to do. You will never have that in this game. You're always going to have something to do. 

Jason  14:44  
Yes, that is one change. They seem to focus on that it was possible in evolution to get locked into a state where you're just behind and you will never be able to catch up because of how far behind you are. And this, they seem to have consciously made it so that doesn't happen. And some players like that, and some players don't. I definitely have some friends who do not like that because they figure games should be hardcore, but I think most people probably enjoy that better. 

Brian  15:06  
Yeah, they can play the Ice Age version.

Thiago  15:09  
Then one thing like, I will actually ask you guys opinions again. I didn't play the game by itself, so it might be just an impression. But I, when I was watching this video, my my impression about, like, the game mechanics and how everything is going for seems to be more complex than like, the evolution in terms of a kind of like the mechanics are. I don't know if it's harder to learn or harder to explain or if just seemed to me, but like you guys felt was harder, or like will be something more difficult to explain to somebody who don't have a gaming background or something like that.

Brian  15:40  
I feel like we're losing our perspective on this. I felt like this was easier than most of the games we've played.

Jason  15:45  
same i i thought it was easier and easier to get into than evolution itself. Okay, all right. Last thing I want to mention that they did keep their sense of humor. So the first player marker this time around is not a dinosaur meeple. It is a snow leopard, meeple, which looks beautiful, and the rule book calls it, and I quote one of the most awesome first player markers in evolutionary history. So they are very proud of their snow leopard. And the victory condition tiebreaker is that if you end up having the same points, you check something you check something else, and if they're still tied, you order a meat lover's pizza and a veggie pizza, and then you play again. Love that. I like the small bits of humor like that anyway. So that's the game. Let's go into the science. And now, since we covered a lot of evolution in our episode on evolution, we'll refer you back to that season one, episode six, for a lot of details for now, Tiago, for listeners who it's been a while, or maybe who didn't catch that episode, can you give us, like, a five minute overview of evolution and natural selection before we get into stuff we didn't have a chance to cover last time?

Brian  16:44  
Yes, speed run. Speed run. Evolution,

Thiago  16:46  
sure. So in a very simple way, evolution is merely what to talk about, biological evolution. Biological evolution is the change of species over time, the change of populations and species over time, right? Evolution, per se, you can see that it's just change. But if you want to talk about biological evolution, you have to talk about changes that are like pass over the generations, and those modifications stay. And while you have one that is usually the most famous of all, we have different processes of evolution, namely four. Gene migration is where like things, genes move away from population to population. We have genetic drift, which is the loss of gain of a characteristics merely by chance mutations, which is a new feature arising because of modifications in your DNA. And perhaps the most famous one, that is natural selection, which is the one who actually it's a conjugation between what the environmental pressures you to do and therefore makes you more able or not to survive in those conditions. And the second part is the ones who are actually able to survive those conditions are usually are the ones who actually going to reproduce more and leave those abilities that make them more prone to survive to the next generation. That's was the idea of, like, evolution and natural selection on a very short way.

Jason  18:04  
Yeah. And I like how you said that migration is the movement of genes, because as far as evolution is concerned, all of us are just carriers for the genes. The gene is the actual unit of evolution that is going on. That's a very famous position by Richard Dawkins from back in the 70s or something, but it's basically held up all right? So we covered those basics last time. So now on to stuff we didn't get to talk about, because there's a very rich field of evolution. There's all sorts of stuff we can talk about. One area I want to talk about is convergent evolution. So this is where things will independently end up evolving the same in the game. This is basically you have players who are playing the same traits, claws or opportunistic or whatever, on their species independently. But in nature this, this also happens. So I guess Thiago, the question for you is, why does this happen? And is everything actually evolving into crabs?

Brian  18:55  
Also, do you have a favorite example of convergent evolution?

Thiago  18:59  
Uh, sure, yes. And I don't know about the crabs, though, but like so I'll think the easiest way of talking about convergence is getting back to natural selection. So I can mention the one of the unsung heroes of like the theory of natural selection as we know nowadays, which is Wallace. Alfred Russel, Wallace, so Wallace was actually the guy who noticed that species are very attuned to their environment, and they feel like, okay, so those guys, they are so attuned to their environment, they seem so well fit. Why is that? And in between the malaria, peak of feverish dreams and the other he wrote, his ideas are like, Well, I believe that the environment is actually pushing certain pressures, and the In response, the species actually modify themselves to actually fit in this environment.

Brian  19:52  
I did not know that part of the story that there was a fever dream epiphany moment.

Thiago  19:56  
Well, that might be an exaggeration, but the truth is, like when he was writing this, he was in the Malay archippelago, and he got malaria when he was there. 

Jason  20:03  
So and importantly, this was completely independent of Darwin. In fact, it was Wallace writing to Darwin and asking him about ideas that finally spurred Darwin to actually put out the stuff he'd been working on for 20 years.

Brian  20:14  
Yeah, get off his duff and publish already, 

Thiago  20:16  
right? Like when Joseph Dalton Hooker actually received a letter from like Wallace. He said, like, you better get your act together, because this kid is going to totaly scoop you.

Brian  20:27  
Hey, there's an example of convergent thinking, right?

Thiago  20:30  
So completely about the convergence, as those ideas converge, like, while Wallace was more focused on the environment and Darwin was more focused on the sexual selection part, what we realize is kind of like, well, you have an environment, and because of constraints in life, like, we don't have an unlimited amount of like solutions for the same problems, right? So if, let's say that you're a predator in the ocean, there's a few things that you can do different, but, like, there's some things that, like, you cannot escape from. You need to be fast, so you need to be able to actually bite and hunt and detect your prey and so on and so forth. So you probably need a body that is more conducive to swim where, like limbs are more prone to swim, and usually you want to have like sharp teeth. And this this kind of adaptation. So hence we got things kind of like sharks and orca whales. They both, more or less have the same solution for a similar problem, how to hunt in the deep water or the ocean, right? So, but one is a fish, the other one is a mammal. They're kind of far away in the tree of life. So what I like to say is like, because the environment pressures them to do something similar, and there's not many options. They converge to certain themes, and that's how we call those conversion evolution. They converge to a more hydrodynamic body, to have flippers, instead of like legs and sharp teeth and so on and so forth. 

Brian  21:53  
So the physics sort of dictate a solution to the problem. 

Thiago  21:57  
Kind of the laws of physics dictate. The laws of chemistry dictates, what can you do to adapt? For instance, you probably won't produce new chemical in your body out of the scratch. Evolution doesn't work from the scratch, right? It always gets things that are already there and kind of repurpose it 

Jason  22:13  
descent with modification, basically 

Thiago  22:15  
Precisely so. For instance, you have frog who most of the diversity of frogs is in warmer environments. But you do have some frogs who live in Alaska, for instance, how they can withstand the cold? Well, some of them, for instance, they have, like, extra glucose dissolve in the blood, which kind of works in an anti free is not a novel chemical. It's just more of the same, the repurpose in a way. So there are what we call historical constraint that works on that. For instance, why don't we see a Pegasus in real life? Because horses are tetrapods, and they're not going to evolve extra pair of limbs out of the blue. So we don't have any vertebrates with more than four limbs that are on the land. So that those are what we call historical constraint. Other constraints that we might have is kind of like, just trade off at some point something that I give you cannot, like, modify something infinitely without moving something in the other dial right when, like, you have different optimizations in the body. For instance, compare a marathon runner with a sprint runner, they have different muscle fibers involved in the process, while one of them has, like, more red muscle fibers who allow for storage of oxygen, and therefore they can actually run for longer periods, so more stamina. The Sprinter has more white muscle fibers who are more into the part of like explosion, like faster movement. 

Brian  23:32  
So one of my favorite examples of convergent evolution is the vertebrate eye versus the cephalopod eye.

Thiago  23:38  
 Oh, that's a good one. 

Brian  23:40  
They are physically almost identical and did not evolve from a common ancestor, sort of independently hit on almost the same solution. In fact, there are some key differences. The cephalopod eye actually has the photoreceptors in front of the veins and nerves like you'd think it should be, because it's more efficient that way, 

Thiago  24:00  
exactly 

Brian  24:00  
the vertebrate eye does not. The photoreceptors are actually behind the veins and nerves, which involves things like why we have blind spots. Now that's just a coincidental happenstance of, like you said, a combination of ancestry and function. It was set up that way to begin with, and you really certain things are just very hard to change,

Thiago  24:18  
right? So there's not many different ways of actually having a camera that forms an image to send to your brain. So eventually those solutions will actually look similar and converge 

Jason  24:29  
yeah, and like vertebrates, they did it through one set of tissue that involves it turning inside out during development, which is why the things that actually intercept the light are behind all the veins and nerves and stuff, whereas cephalopods, it's more direct, and a few other things anyway. So for those of you who are wondering about the crab comment, the internet's darling of convergent evolution is crabs, and I didn't know why, so I had to look into this. 

Brian  24:51  
Like, how hermit crabs aren't crabs?

Jason  24:53  
Yeah, well, apparently, like, 100 years ago, there was someone who knows, like, Oh, hey, a crab, like, body shape has evolved. Solved five separate times among crustaceans. And so he coined the word carcinization for this, of the tendency of to turn something into a crab. Now the thing is, these were all like lobster like things anyway, so that wasn't that big. They just got shorter around her and such. And then somehow someone mentioned this in 2019 on like Twitter or something, and then it went viral. And so now you look all over there all sorts of memes about things turning into crabs. There's an XKCD comic about it and everything. But I gotta admit, when I was doing research for this, like I'm really disappointed that that's what we picked. I mean, I am not that impressed with carcinization. Actually, it's five times from five closely related things I was looking around. Anteaters have evolved 12 different times on all three different branches of the mammals tree. So placentals, like us, marsupials and even monotremes, which I assume is echidnas.

Brian  25:49  
Are we counting the Aye? Aye? Because there's even a primate Anteater. I guess it's not an anteater.

Jason  25:53  
Ants or termites, so, okay, they're basically the same. So those trees, so Brian and I love trees because they're plants. Everything tries to be a tree.

Brian  26:02  
There really should be arborization. Everything there's every branch of the plant family. Tree has plant family well, tree, you know what? I mean, everything in the plant family has a member that is a tree. 

Jason  26:12  
Yeah, I actually wanted to check if that's true. I mean, you look around so palm trees are a monocot, so they evolved in trees different from like the dicots, like apple trees and oak trees, you've got your pines, which are conifers. Anciently, there were giant tree ferns when the dinosaurs were around. Bamboo is basically grass doing its best job to become a tree. I don't know about orchids. Are there any orchid trees?

Brian  26:39  
Ooh, okay, then maybe I, maybe I spoke too soon, but, but the idea of having a big, tall stem with a canopy to get light is just a very good way of being a plant. I guess it's interesting to realize that trees are not related to each other, right? There are the closest relatives, for many trees are things that are not trees.

Jason  26:55  
yeah. And so that's converted because basically, again, they're trying to solve the same problem. When you're a plant, you want light, you want to get tall, and having a bunch of leaves down at the bottom isn't as useful as having a bunch of leaves at the top. And so you want some way to go high and then put all your leaves and photosynthetic stuff up there. And so you end up with something that looks like a tree. And there's many different ways this has been solved. I guess, if we were to boil it down, convergent evolution sounds like comes down to while there are an infinite number of solutions to any problem, most of them are bad, and there's only a small number of good solutions, so things tend to converge on that. 

Jason  27:20  
That about right? 

Thiago  27:29  
Yeah, I guess was. Dawkins was also says there's many ways to be alive, but there's many, many more ways of being dead.

Jason  27:37  
I like that. I'm gonna have to remember that one. All right, so moving on to a different topic. We talk a lot about natural selection, but I know we humans have become essentially a our own evolutionary force here on the planet. What are some examples of humans causing evolution? And I specifically want to avoid domestication, because we have a future episode focusing just on that, so not things like our domesticated plants and animals. Yes, we've warped those incredibly but more the accidental evolution that we're causing in the world. 

Thiago  28:08  
So whenever I mention anything related to human influence on selective pressures, I like to call this artificial selection, because is, in a way, is us taking place, or nature actually setting the condition for like, what is being selected or not? And in that sense, perhaps you can talk about, like, one of the most textbook examples of like selection, which is, like the moths of England, like the Biston betularia moths, right? 

Jason  28:35  
Oh yeah, the peppered moths. 

Thiago  28:37  
The peppered moths, yeah. So you have, like, the the melanic form, which is completely black, and more common form, which was the peppered one that was white, and we see both of those in nature. But like the whites were more common because they blend with the lichen in some countries, so they blend better, so they avoid predators better. But during the Industrial Revolution, in some areas, like the trees were covered with soot, so the trees itself become black, so out of the sudden the game change, and the pepper moths were the melanic were Blackish. They blend better, so their population levels exponentially grew. So you can call this us influencing the evolution of like animals, or setting the tone for what is selected or not, right? But I guess my favorite example is the elephants on Mozambique, the Gorongosa park. You guys heard about that? 

Jason  29:28  
Yes. Is this where they're selecting for smaller tusks? 

Thiago  29:31  
Yes. So tusks are used by both female and male elephants for like several different tasks, like digging holes, for getting water, like to take off bark off trees, for actually eating and so on. As well. Any males, they have an extra function, which is actually sexual selection. Like elephant bulls, they fight with each other using their tusks, right? But in that particular place, in Mozambique, because they they had a civil war, and like the guerilla, fighters were actually actively poaching and hunting elephants. To actually get their tusks and sell ivory in the market, in the black market, to actually fund their guerrilla efforts. So as a consequence, they actually put a pressure on that particular population of elephants. Suddenly getting tusks means that, like, you're more likely to be dead than alive. So we start to increase to see a population of tuskless females more than the  natural we expected. So tuskless females existed before, but they're a very minimal part of the population. But because of that, they jump from like what used to be between 10 and 15% to actually 50% of the population. And there's some studies being done now they're like, now they're like, the Sufi war is over, and all those elephants are in protected areas. Those numbers are falling down again to actually what's expected to be the natural existent population.

Jason  30:50  
Okay? So when humans are hunting, specifically elephants with big tusks, then it's bad to have tusks, but when we're not, then you need them for all the other things. And so it's shifting back to the previous one.

Thiago  31:01  
righ its the idea that, like, a natural selection is a balance in between actually getting the mates, but actually also to survive to get to reproductive age. So if you don't get to the reproductive age, you're not going to survive. Of course, you have a balance in that we can get into talk about, like, what they call runaway selection, or Fisherian selection, where, like, the sexual selective traits are exaggerated to a point that, like they might actually make survival harder. For instance, the peacocks tail. But the whole idea there is, like, you making a situation where the only way that you can get to reproductive age is to sacrifice being good, like, or being better, like, actually extracting bark and anything, or finding other ways to solve your problem, which is surviving. So that explains the high amount of like tuskless elephants females in that population.

Jason  31:49  
I know I've heard of something similar to this happening here in the US, where, because when you hear a rattlesnake rattle, that rattlesnake usually gets killed, there's now selection for rattlesnakes that have some mutation so their rattle doesn't work.

Brian  32:03  
Oh, oh, just busted, like, not less, not smaller, just does not rattle anymore.

Jason  32:08  
Yeah, just some mutation where the thing that separates the scale so it can actually rattle doesn't work. And so, like, you can shake its tail doesn't make any noise. And so we're now selecting for silent rattlesnakes, which is probably not what we want to do, but it's what's happening,

Thiago  32:21  
right? And that's why I mentioned, like artificial selection is when humans, they select by purposely or by accident, selecting a particular phenotype. One very simple to understand is when you over harvest, over harvest, or over fish, a population of fishes. What happens? Like, usually get the big ones because you want eat more, you want the bigger fish, but unintendedly, you ended up making the pressure for the population. So like, Oh, if I'm big, I'm going to die. So it better be small,

Brian  32:48  
so they stay smaller, or they'll reach reproductive age faster. Or you select for those that can, I suppose,

Thiago  32:53  
but sometimes those are the only one alive to actually, they're the only game in town for the females.

Jason  32:58  
Now I remember reading So Jared Diamond has his book collapse about like the downfall of civilizations. And one of the examples he uses in there, I believe it was Rapa Nui, so Easter Island. And they looked at midden heaps, so the piles of shells and stuff left over just over centuries from the natives. And they saw that over time, the shell size got smaller and smaller and smaller due to this selective harvesting of the biggest oysters or clams or whatever it was, because we're humans, we're lazy. We want to get the most for our buck so we get the biggest things, because then we get the most out of it.

Brian  33:28  
That's not just humans, that's all animals.

Jason  33:31  
Yes, we're just particularly good at it.

Thiago  33:34  
Exactly what is believed to be one of the reasons for the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna is not only the Ice Age, the climate change, but actually anthropic action, like we hunt the bigger animals that we had because we're hungry. So that's one of the reasons the models are saying now that, like, that's why we don't have, like, giant sloths anymore, or, like many of like those places seen big mammals that we get extinct at the time.

Brian  34:00  
This is also the theory of why the only continent that still has large megafauna is Africa, where we co evolved with that megafauna.

Jason  34:08  
It took us a long time to figure out how to hunt well, and so they had time to adapt, whereas everywhere else, as soon as humans move in, not immediately, but over the next few centuries to millennia, the really big animals all tend to go extinct. Again, we're very good at that. So I want to transition to the next one says, in the game, we talk a lot about species, and in the game, the species just appear. But in actual nature, we have speciation, so things turn into different species. And we've talked about how evolution is not necessarily one species changed into another or splitting. But I do want to ask when we're talking about what is a species, and then how do we get new species occurring?

Thiago  34:44  
Oh, that's a $1 million question, what is a species? So as a systematisist that's a question very dear to my heart, because it's part of what I do, right? So I describe new species. It's part of the job, but it might be, kind of seems like a question that is easy to. Answer. But like, you'd be surprised. Like, there is this paper from 2001 that counts more than 20 different species definition and Darwin himself, he was very vague about what species mean to him. Like he said, like, well, while no naturalist can they agree on a certain definition, everybody knows what they're talking about when I talk about a species. So in certain sense, it's kind of like species, oh, you know when you see it. But the concept of species, and you have plenty of them, are kind of like, none of them are perfect. For instance, take, like, the biological species concept, which is probably the most famous one that was championed by Mayr in the beginning of like, the new synthesis. So that concept is, though, is the famous one that is, oh, species are a group of like, interbreeding populations that leave fertile descendants.

Brian  35:46  
So essentially defining species by the genes,

Thiago  35:49  
no basically defining species as organisms that are able to breed with themselves and leave fertile descendants for the capacity of reproduction. And right there, if we think a little bit we have a problem. So what about asexual reproductive organisms? How they tell them apart?

Jason  36:06  
Yeah, we deal with this in bacteria all the time, right? Most people think about this in terms of, like, animals, invertebrates and stuff, but bacteria, it's like, no one actually has a good definition for a bacterial species and what separates them?

Brian  36:18  
No, we have conventions, basically, that seem to roughly correlate to this idea of the ones that are more genetically similar and even share genes more frequently. So it's sort of a pseudo biological species concept.

Thiago  36:32  
I heard like about a genetic species concept, but like, they tell different organisms apart. For like, if they have that particular gene, 98% similar is the same thing. Otherwise is another one. I don't know if that's what you guys are mentioning.

Jason  36:45  
It's this all sounds like, basically, nature is very complex and messy, and we humans try to draw our little boxes around it, but there's always going to be bleed through. There's always gonna be corner cases that don't quite fit 

Thiago  36:56  
right? When I talk about speciations in my classes, I talk like that's a very philosophical question, because, do we believe that species are natural kinds, or not so natural kind? It's will be something that like without any subjectivity, has an identity? You can think about this. For instance, chemical elements are natural kinds, right? Because hydrogen is different from helium, because they have one more proton that's quantifiable, that's measurable, and this actually makes them essentially two different things. The question for species is, are those natural kinds? Because if they are, there's probably there is a particular idea that we can find or can tell them apart. But if they're not, we're just, again, trying to box things away in the way that, like might be imperfect, I like to think species more like a hypothesis, right? So we try to explain the world, and we're trying to explain biodiversity, and by that, we hypothesize that, like certain groups of individuals, they belong to a species. So they're a cluster of life that is different from others. And if you use that, you can actually change this, like somebody can get a better hypothesis of, like this cluster of individuals, and it is possible to go there and repeat, improve, like any science. So I like to think it's in species as a hypothesis of relationship amongst individuals,

Jason  38:14  
sounds to me almost like it's a continuum. Like you have at one end there are things that are definitely the same species, and at the other end you have things that are definitely different species. And then in the middle, you have a bunch of stuff that is like part way between and maybe more similar or less similar.

Thiago  38:29  
right!

Jason  38:30  
I actually ran across a few examples of these while doing research for this episode. So, so when they built the London Underground, there are stable populations of mosquitoes that only live in the London Underground, and they are now genetically distinct from their above ground cousins, and even different tunnels are genetically distinct from each other and have trouble reproducing with each other.

Brian  38:51  
You've got sort of a cave ecosystem or an island ecosystem effect,

Jason  38:55  
yeah. And apparently, the same thing has happened with mice in new york city's parks, because, like, the parks of the green space, where the mice live, and then there's a bunch of cities separating them all, and they've started to separate, maybe not completely separate yet, but they are starting to diverge.

Brian  39:08  
It's a green island. It's like the mountaintop divergence, right? They're separated by spaces they can't cover. That's, oh man, I'm gonna forget Tiago. What is it when speciation is driven by physical barriers?

Thiago  39:20  
Is a epicarious event. Is like a allopatric speciation.

Brian  39:23  
Allopatric speciation, yeah. So populations get separated and just naturally diverge, either in behavior or genetics such that no longer, when they meet again, they're either unlikely to breed or are incapable of breeding. 

Thiago  39:36  
Yeah, so again, when you separate to population by physical bariers, what we call allopatric speciation. But you can have speciation in species who actually can visit the other ones. Those are sympatric speciation, or sometimes, parapatric, speciation, when you have some sort of division that is not exactly physical.

Jason  39:55  
So like allopatric is like a different place. sympatric, same place. parapatric, like, sort of neighboring place. 

Thiago  40:02  
Yes, it's kind of like, if we imagine, for instance, like you have a forest, basically the case, like we're talking about here. So we have a forest, but like this forest was, like, slowly degrading, so you only have kind of, like in the peripheries. You have, like, some leftovers forests. So the populations were in this peripheries. They cannot reach the inner big forest that they have. They call this peripatric speciation because in the periphery. But the whole idea is, like, you have isolation for some reason, right? And that's isolation might lead to speciation, or you can have like, new speciation by colonization, right? So instead of like being isolated, you can move to an isolated place.

Jason  40:38  
It's kind of like the mosquito tunnels. Apparently, that territory did not exist until we dug it out.

Thiago  40:44  
And those mosquitoes were, like, colonized there, and like, they found, like all they need to actually thrive by leave, right.

Jason  40:50  
Okay, all right. Last topic, before we wrap things up, is that I think in the popular consciousness, there's the idea that evolution is towards more complex things, because that has been the trend of things on Earth where we have we start with very simple life, and then it gets kind of more complicated over time. And of course, we humans are the pinnacle of evolution, because we are very egocentric like that. But evolution isn't directional like that. That has been a trend that has happened. But there can be evolution in other directions. But I don't think people really capture this like I know there are multiple Star Trek episodes that have to do with the next stage of evolution being, like, going into an energy being or something, but that's something. That's not how it works. 

Brian  41:26  
Star Trek really gets science wrong on so many levels. But that's okay. 

Jason  41:31  
That's okay.  It's fun. I love Star Trek. 

Thiago  41:33  
There was this series of books called, like, future zoology. You guys heard about that was like, they have kind of, like a science, a biological fantasy,

Brian  41:40  
oh yeah, the speculative evolution I've got "After Man" Dougal Dixon had a bunch of those. I think I've got his whole set. 

Jason  41:46  
I have not heard of those. Off to check them out. 

Brian  41:48  
Oh, I'll lend them to you. They're they're weird.

Jason  41:50  
So my question about this is, what are examples of the opposite? What are examples where evolution has selected for simplicity from something that was complex?

Thiago  41:59  
I think like it when you talk about complex and simplicity, the first thing we should ask ourselves is, what does it mean to be complex, or what it does it mean to be simple, right? Because how do we kind of, like define it? For instance, you can talk about, for instance, parasites, right? So they can you can think about like, oh, well, they're very simple organisms. Or you can think about like, no, they're actually very complex in terms of specialization. Can you live in a pH of three? They can in our stomachs, for instance, some of like those flatforms, they can live in our stomachs, like, which is a very high pH place. Other extremophiles, like their keys, they live in, like, very inhospitable place that we cannot so they have probably complex physiological adaptations to do that. They work in different ways, but I guess you're right in the sense that, like we have this vision about we expect all complex adaptations in complex organisms, which is not always true. For instance, jellyfishes, they barely have tissues, but they do not have a central nervous system. They do not have like organs and so on so forth. However, they do have like a complex organ, quote, unquote, that you might call rophalia, which has some, like, photo sensitive cells, some actually very complex. They can form, like rudimentary images. And actually they have, like, what they call a gravitational organ that, like, has, like those little rocks they call lithocysts. And they can use that to actually see senses and gravity, which kind of, like, helps them to orient themselves into the water column.

Brian  43:25  
Oh, that's cool. What is that sensor in your cell phone that, like, tells you when I'm trying, Jason, what's it? What's it called when you've got this sensor that can detect how it's oriented relative to gravity in electronics?

Jason  43:36  
Not the gyroscope? Is it? 

Brian  43:36  
Well, a gyroscope would be one way to do that, but that's cool. So, so basically, jellyfish have a bunch of unique organs, so I guess different solutions. They can still see, but they don't have eyes,

Thiago  43:49  
yeah, which is quite complex for an organism who is so downstream in the tree of life and don't even have a central nervous system. 

Jason  43:58  
Yeah? Actually, at Dragon Con this past year, I talked on a panel called slime time. We talked about slime molds, which have no central nervous system, but do a lot of coordination. They're able to solve mazes and other stuff through basically exploring and then pruning.

Brian  44:11  
No central nervous system?. They don't have a body other than the one that they put together from time to time as a convenience.

Thiago  44:17  
Maybe they are more they're smarter than us, because with very little, they solve similar problems. Maybe we're too complex for our own good.

Brian  44:25  
I'm always, you know, cheerleading for bacteria that solve amazing problems, and there's way more of them than our of us in terms of both diversity and number. So really, it's a bacterial world. We're just here. 

Thiago  44:36  
Yeah, they're probably going to be here after we're gone.

Brian  44:39  
Oh, that's not even a question they absolutely would outlive us, but you know, they won't be sending signals into space anytime soon. So

Jason  44:47  
yeah, so this discussion reminds me of Douglas Adams from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, saying on earth that humans had always assumed that they were the most intelligent species because they'd created the wheel and digital wrist watches and wars and stuff like. That while dolphins were just like stuck in the water running around, having a good time, and the dolphins thought that they were the most intelligent species on the planet for exactly the same reasons. So we probably have a very homocentric view of what it means to be a complex, highly advanced organism. 

Brian  45:17  
I think it is important to point out that, like nothing on earth that is extant is more or less evolved than anything else. Everything has been here and been evolving for the same amount of time,

Thiago  45:29  
which is a concept that I have, like, no problems, but like, it's hard, like, for the students actually to grasp when they come to classes like, say, hey, this makes no sense to say, like, we are more evolved than anything else. We're as evolved as, right,so.

Brian  45:42  
As the mites that live in your eyebrows 

Thiago  45:43  
exactly, or the bacteria, 

Jason  45:45  
we're just solving different problems 

Thiago  45:47  
in different ways, 

Jason  45:49  
all right? So we need to wrap this up. So let's transition on to grading. Thiago, you got to play the app, and Brian and I got to play the board game in person. Thiago, I'll give you first play on this. What did you think

Brian  46:00  
we have started doing fun grades and science grades sort of back to back. So if you want to give it science and fun grade, we can do that.

Thiago  46:07  
So in terms of science, I think was really good, of course, all the liberties that it takes to actually make this thing fun, right? But I'll give you a solid A- to the science one. And as for the fun part, I'll give it an A I thought was really fun. The app was really fun. Has a nice tutorial, is really well explained. I didn't have the chance to play against a different person through the app, but like, it seems fun to me. It's something I'm dieing to try the tabletopversion. 

Jason  46:31  
How about you? Brian, 

Brian  46:32  
yeah I'm totally happy with an A as well, a for science and A for fun. I think that the replayability is there, and it's kind of, I was telling Jason, this is sort of the magic the gathering of evolution-based board games, because you can add in the different modules to add new mechanics and new systems and stuff like that. You know, there's always a little bit of liberties that get taken for the sake of the game. But I think that the core is there and the core is good. 

Jason  46:56  
I'm probably going to give it, probably in A- to A range for science, simply because, like, what they have, it seems decent. I feel like there were probably opportunities to put a little bit more in so that they could explain a bit more, like in the Reference Guide, to put a little bit more, but they have little bits and pieces that they talk about. I thought there was an opportunity for more if they so chose. But overall, what they have seems pretty solid for gameplay. I think I'm gonna have to give a context dependent grade. If I only had the core game and was playing only that, I'd probably only give it a B to a B+ the core game is fine, but it's not one that I would go back to for years and years and years. I think the real replayability comes through adding into various modules. And so the modules boosted up into like probably into the A range, because you can mix and match and get the ones that you want the most. 

Brian  47:43  
The funny thing is, I would say that the base game almost is like a, what we would call a palette cleanser game, a short, quick game that you could play between things, which, for what is a relatively complicated game, still plays 30 minutes. Is it's only four rounds. It plays fast, right? And I guess we didn't do nit picks. But I would say I would like to see more games with these sort of themes, have that dedicated booklet of the science in the game, like we get at genius games. I think it would be, I guess it adds to production costs, but it's such a valuable little resource to be able to put into what you're doing,

Jason  48:16  
like, even if it's just like one page in the rule book, it would be good. I'm flipping through the rule book now they have, like, they reference Darwin on one page and such, but it's not I think they could have mentioned more, but again, maybe that wasn't their goal.

Brian  48:30  
Yeah, I just want a paragraph. That's all. We're gonna have to start doing this for people. I guess 

Jason  48:35  
we just need to start writing to all the game comes like, Look, you need to cater to the scientists in your audience, you need to put in the page of science stuff on anything that has something to do with science.

Thiago  48:45  
Come on. I was telling Jason, before you arrived, Brian, I can totally knock at their door like they're just right next door, like we live in the same place, the North Star game students in the Gettysburg where I live. 

Brian  48:55  
Oh, okay, yeah. Go do that. Go tell us what they say. 

Thiago  48:58  
I want to pester them. 

Jason  48:59  
Go deliver our petition in person. 

Brian  49:02  
Evidently,we need to do an event in DC or something. We got too many people in DC, huh?

Jason  49:07  
All right, well, we're going to wrap it up there. So thank you, Thiago, for being on here. Is there any place you want people to be able to look you up afterwards?

Thiago  49:14  
Ah, no, I'm fine.

Brian  49:16  
Do you want us to point people to your Google Scholar profile or anything?

Thiago  49:20  
No, it's too shameful.

Jason  49:23  
All right. Well, then thank you for being on here again. Thiago, we're glad to have you back. Thank you listeners for coming. We hope that if you have nature or have a chance to play it, you enjoy it, and we're going to wrap up there. So have a great month and happy gaming.

Brian  49:35  
Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. 

Jason  49:35  
This has been the game with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsements 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. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai