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Co-Evolution

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Welwordion:
Even if we did not evolve from cells having cloroplasts, its not unusual for genes etc to migrate and their are even species that consume alga in order to use the chloroplasts for energy production, the reason this is not common is like in most cases its a cost usefulness problem.
Producing chlorophyll is not without cost also you need magnesium for it , which means you need enough light  to make the effort worthwhile.
For one cellular organisms this is simple a comparision of whats more energy efficient to do photosynthesis, using other chemical energy sources or stealing energy.
For multicellular organisms its a question of design, if you are moving you consume more energy than you can produce so you need feeding mechanism with or without photosynthesis, you rely on the surplus if a much larger biomass than you(if the sun intensity would be larger on our planet maybe it would be different) However in order to make photosynthesis profitable for you you need exposed surface that stays in the sun and you need to repair the extra sun damage caused to those surfaces.
In other words you either need bare skin not scales etc or hair like ice bears etc have that channels the light inside the hair and you need to stay most of the time outside in the light.
The fact that ice bears do not do photosysnthesis is probably due to the fact that gene immigration etc is much harder to do for multicellular sexual reproducing organisms.

Peksa:
I've got co-evolution going on for 2,9M cycles in my current evosim. There's been some discussion on the forum about default rates of mutation being too high for stable evolution, so I've set it to 1/32 of normal rates and tweaked mutation probabilities a bit so that DNA should build up instead of shortening. Despite little mutations and slooow evolution, there's been intersting co-evolution. Veggies have moved constantly, moved away from bots, shot info-shots that interfered with hunting (stored 0 in .dx) and bots have managed to overcome every time. At the moment veggies use shell for defence. As for bots, I've pretty much managed to evolve Animal minimalis to C. Circumgirans again

The sim's got alga minimalis and animal minimalis with body/energy management. Animal minimalis has got 900 some generations and 80 mutations.  It's maybe a tad too little, but I want to see how it turns out. Veggie maxpop is at 20000 to allow natural population control, which has worked great. Total population has varied from ~1000 to ~6000. Costs are nearly F1 and veggies get 8 nrg/cycle/kilobodypoint.

The only problem is that the sim is really slow to run, from 0,5 to 3 cycles per sec on my computer and I'm in the army (There's compulsory military service in Finland) at the moment, so I can only run it on weekends. That combined with very slow evolution it gets a bit boring at times. I plan on running the sim as much as I can until my patience runs out. With so small mutation rates devolution shouldn't be a problem so in the long run there should be some nice evolution. I hope.

The sim's attached.

jknilinux:
First of all, endy, there is no "chloroplasts vs. mitochondria." Plants have both.

And what's still weird? Pollination?

Welwordion-

Yes, nothing is without a cost, but movement doesn't magically turn photosynthesis from producing tons of energy to being a drain on resources. In fact, photosynthesis used to be too efficient- the reason plants use a green pigment instead of something that better absorbs yellow light is because the first photosynthesizers did use a different pigment- it was purple, which is great at absorbing yellow light. However, having soo much extra energy apparently made evolution stop working on them- they didn't need to move, they didn't need to evolve period. In the meantime, the green photosynthesizers continued evolving, since they had to to make up for their energy loss, and now all complex plants are green, while the purple bacteria are stuck in hot springs.

And, even though plants have found horribly inefficient forms of movement, that doesn't prevent them from contributing to their survival. If you gave evolution a few billion more years, plants would evolve to run, but it's just a huge evolutionary leap for them now. In fact, by their very nature, they have cell walls, which they'd have to lose first in order to move efficiently, but I don't see why they'd want to lose them in the first place- just one example of why they're stuck in their local minima.

Anyway, I don't see how genes could go from plants to animals... And even if they did, the animals wouldn't get the chloroplasts, since chloroplasts replicate on their own and basically still act like "bacteria" inside the cell, so to get chloroplast DNA you'd have to look at the chloroplast, not the nucleus.

Ikke, Peksa-

Almost forgot to say, Thanks for the sims!

I'm working on a sim where bots can only sexrepro and cannot move with conventional forms of movement (.up, .dn, .sx, .dx) and am already seeing amoeboids that move only using ties- they find a plant, grow like crazy until they kill it, then explode into a cloud of "spores", or single-celled bots, that wait until they hit a plant, and the cycle starts over again. Although the amoeboids can move a little on their own, like from one plant to another nearby one, they aren't that good at it yet- they mainly move using spores. Once I see where this goes, I'll look at yours. Thanks again!

Peter:

--- Quote from: jknilinux ---Yes, nothing is without a cost, but movement doesn't magically turn photosynthesis from producing tons of energy to being a drain on resources. In fact, photosynthesis used to be too efficient- the reason plants use a green pigment instead of something that better absorbs yellow light is because the first photosynthesizers did use a different pigment- it was purple, which is great at absorbing yellow light. However, having soo much extra energy apparently made evolution stop working on them- they didn't need to move, they didn't need to evolve period. In the meantime, the green photosynthesizers continued evolving, since they had to to make up for their energy loss, and now all complex plants are green, while the purple bacteria are stuck in hot springs.
--- End quote ---
Most light from the sun is red. So green is the best color to have. Why would you need yellow light for fotosyntesis?
The reason green won, is becouse it is better at absorbing the red light.
If plants really would get more energy if they where purple, they would get purple.
Cyanobacteria do use something more from the light-spectrum, I could be wrong. Do you mean that one.


--- Quote ---And, even though plants have found horribly inefficient forms of movement, that doesn't prevent them from contributing to their survival. If you gave evolution a few billion more years, plants would evolve to run, but it's just a huge evolutionary leap for them now. In fact, by their very nature, they have cell walls, which they'd have to lose first in order to move efficiently, but I don't see why they'd want to lose them in the first place- just one example of why they're stuck in their local minima.
--- End quote ---
Plants don't need to move, that's why they don't move. As long there is light, they do as less as possible in my view. The reason, to reproduce as fast as possible.

jknilinux:
Peter-

What do you mean when you say the sun is red?

Look here:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070...rple_earth.html

The guy there presents two hypotheses: Purple bacteria absorbed yellow light the best, but were inefficient. Or, he says purple bacteria absorbed yellow light the best, and were too efficient. I think he never actually checked to see which one is more efficient, retinal or chlorophyll. Either way, purple is better at absorbing yellow light, and might have actually given too much energy to the archaea, causing their downfall. So, photosynthesis can produce tons of energy. So, it would be beneficial for animals to photosynthesize, and for plants to move. However, the evolutionary leap to go from plant to animal is too big. So, plants remain plants, and that's why they don't run amok killing animals in real life. Yet (LOL ).

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