Cute-E – Pikmin

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Natural Sciences, Education, Earth Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome … to Cute-E! During our Spook-E series, we speculate on the evolution of monsters from myth and popular media, but we leave out fiction’s more adorable creatures. In Cute-E, we choose cuddlier critters and discuss how they – or something like them – could evolve here on Earth, pulling inspiration from real-world species across our planet’s history. This year’s theme is Monsters of Nintendo. This episode, we pluck precious partners from the soil. What could be the evolutionary background of tiny and colorful workers that blend the features of plants and animals? Our creatures to create this time: Pikmin. Join the Common Descent Discord server for more Spook-E and Cute-E discussion! https://discord.gg/CwPBxdh9Ev Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast More ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent podcast.
0:07.8	And welcome to Cute E.
0:11.3	Hello, Will.
0:12.5	Beak me, pick me, David.
0:15.1	And hello, everybody.
0:17.3	And welcome to Cute E.
0:20.8	Cute E is a bonus episode that we do at the end of Spooky season every year, where we choose, instead of monsters from myth and popular fiction, adorable things from myth and popular fiction, and then speculate how that creature or something like it might evolve
0:38.9	in the real world using the toolkit of real world biology.
0:43.7	This year's theme has been monsters of Nintendo.
0:48.5	All throughout October, we evolved monstrous creatures from across the Nintendo franchises,
0:58.1	piranha plants, octarocks, Kremlings, and Metroid.
1:05.0	Now to wrap the whole thing up, we're picking a cute group.
1:11.8	This will be the last episode of spooky season this year, but on November 8th, on our YouTube channel, we will have a spooky live stream where anyone can join us to chit-chat about our speculative evolution endeavors.
1:18.2	This year's episode of QT.E. is Pickman. Picman. Kekman chosen partially because they are
1:26.2	extremely adorable and because they're a big deal of Nintendo IP
1:30.2	But also I wanted to make sure we picked at least one thing that is
1:33.8	Relatively recent
1:35.5	Yes, yes
1:36.6	All the others ended up being really classic Nintendo stuff and Pickman is early 2000s so it's not like it's brand new
1:43.6	But it gets us a little bit closer to now.
1:48.2	Pickman are these days very famously, a little plant-like creatures that work together in a big group and navigate a planet under the leadership of Captain Alamar or other leaders.
2:00.4	As with the previous episodes, what we're going to do is do a dive through the lore of
	...

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