#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 Thiago01:26 - Spider milk!03:34 - Basics of Evolution13:37 - Evolutionary science18:35 - Mutation24:24 - Competition and the Red Queen's Race29:38 - What is sex for?33:30 - Final Grades39:27 - Fun species names Links: Evolution website (North Star Games)Original game (Right Games RGB) Spider milk!Red Queen HypothesisLamarck 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 ...
