Yeah, I've had my own super evil plants :evil: Nasty things, wiped out my whole population. :lol: Before the extinction though the bots did start showing signs of horizontal gene transfer :) I was able to watch multiple bots from divergent lines become canni's(a "better" form) simultaneously. I also saw signs of selfish gene transfer going on, forever reproducing bots spreading their "defect" to others.
1) Prevents non-conspecs from actvating the gene
Now this is a great idea. It would take a little bit of work but maybe adding:
*971 .out1 store
and
A B *.out1 sgn mult store
would do the trick. Using epigenics to set out1, ought to keep the veggies from using the genes for a long while at least.
2) Deletes the gene that it's supposed to replace (each gene has a corresponding memloc telling the other genes where it is using *.thisgene)
Tricky to manage unfortunatly. It's next to impossible to tell which gene is which from inside the dna. Could just delgene a random gene whenever genelen is greater than initial. That would maintain the size, just not sure what other effects it would have...
Makes you wonder how much of real organisms' characteristics, especially higher animals, are epigenetic in nature.
If you isolate some human babies in a room with each other, with no outside intervention (though you somehow give them food and water, etc.) will they develop language on their own?
I think they would develop the basics. Fortunatly the knowledge can be learned, so if it's been learned once it's possible to learn anew.
I think as mamals in general we use epigenetics to add like another layer of coding above the dna. The dna serves as a sort of template and the epigenetics as a sort of super template.
I think memory has to be impermanent, its more designed to cope with a rapidly changing world than to keep track of past events. I think memory basically takes experiences and compresses them into a simpler form. We can easily transmit these nuggets to others but not the entire memory. As individuals and a species we keep the most important recent information, but the older/less useful info is lost.