Today on Data Skeptic Animal Intelligence, we're

talking about modeling evolution. I speak with Ben Holler, who's the primary developer on a project called Slim. It's not worth defining that acronym, but it's a simulation system for ecological purposes. Becky, were you familiar with this before we started looking into the topic?

I was not, and I was really pleasantly surprised with this interview and how much I learned and what a powerful tool this is. I can totally see why evolutionary biologists would want to use this.

Could you give a quick summary before we let Ben do the formal definition?

Sure. Slim allows researchers to basically model evolution from a genetic standpoint, actually looking at the genetic code, but they're able to customize their simulations using different scripts to add in all sorts of functions and variables that you might not be able to do with other pieces of software. So if I wanted to model the evolution of some birds in response to a predator, but I wanted to know how does mate preference, so females liking blue feathers or something like that, interact with, say, this predation selective pressure, you could potentially do that with a tool like Slim. So the customization is just really wild. We have lots of things, evolutionary biologists are big fans of shiny apps, if you're familiar with those, of making things for students. Yeah, where you can play with variables and evolutionary systems and see what happens. So this is like that on steroids. It's phenomenally cool.