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Survival of the fittest

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Numsgil:
Haha.

Mother Earth knew her mistake and tried to do us in with a giant volcano strategically placed for maximum damage.  Unfortunately her plan backfired.  "Is that all you got?"

EricL:
Population bottlenecks in sexually reproducing species work because they reduce genetic diversity.  In a smaller population, alleles fixate.  Diversity is reduced.  Where before there were blue eyes and brown eyes, now everyone has blue eyes.  Any subsequent evolution on that reduced population starts from a less diverse gene pool.  Any new allele that crops up for a gene due to a mutation has fewer alleles to compete with.  The probability that it will be advatageous relative to the single or few remaining alleles for that gene is larger that it would be if it had to compete against many alleles.  Speciation accelerates relative to a larger population.

But this is only inportant for sexually reproducing organisms.  It is the constant geneflow between individuals and sub popualations within the larger sexually reproducing population that keeps multiple alleles from fixating in the first place.  Bottlenecking asexually reproducing organisms doesn't mean anything since there is (usually) no gene flow between them.

I'm all for adding new and different types of selective pressures but it won't do much if there is no diversity in the sim upon which selection can operate.  We first need to get to the point where geneticly different organisms can coexist for a long time in proximity in the same sim.  We must get to the point where every hetertropic organism in the sim doesn't share a recent common ancestor.  

To this end, I think what we really need is a richer environment that offers more niches to occupy I.e. rocks to hide under, lakes to swim in, richer morphs so we can get parasites, symbioates, etc.   It will take time and cpu cyles and larger sims with more organisms, but bottom line, we are lacking environmental diversity.

Zinc Avenger:
Well then, what we need is a bunch of teleporter-linked sims with different environmental settings. I kept running into "error 76, path not found" after ten minutes or so with teleporters, so I'm currently trying some troubleshooting before I submit a bug report. But if teleporters work for anyone else, then perhaps that would be a good avenue to pursue.

Numsgil:
I get that error too when I use my Darwinbots.exe autorunner utility.  It must have to do with Hard Drive IO or something along those lines.

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