General > Biology

Cambrian explosion

<< < (2/3) > >>

ikke:

--- Quote from: jknilinux ---ikke-
what do you mean by "have algea and animals follow separate evolutionary steps for instance by different (contradictory) metabolism genes." Do you mean to make sure that sexrepro offspring of the algae and animals will not be viable?
--- End quote ---
Not directly. What I meant to say is that animals and algae should have diverging evolutionary pathways each with their own increasing fitness. Currently veggies are a tick in the appropriate control box, not a set of genes making a bot fit to photosynthesis  (Spelling?? Not my native language...). Furthermore these (absent) genes should exclude efficient animal genes. While there are efficient hunters that are green, this is not due to the fact that they are autotrophe.

jknilinux:
Numsgil-

You mean the snowball earth? Well, we don't have any limitation like that in our evosims, so it must be something else, right? Otherwise, we should have passed the precambrian stage by now.

ikke-

Oh- you mean we need a red queen's race (see above link)? But that should've been around long before the cambrian, since whenever there are predators, there's predprey co-evolution. And, since predators were around long before the cambrian, that doesn't seem to explain it.

However, I agree there should be a gene like ".makechlorophyll", instead of just checking a box. Perhaps the makechlorophyll gene should automatically root the bot in place?

shvarz:
One thing that DB definitely lacks is the ability to simulate millions of organisms for billions of cycles. So there is a hard-wired limit for you. That said, I think I heard somewhere that cambrian explosion was mainly due to abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere. Suddenly energy became much cheaper.
You can simulate this by turning down all the costs in your sim and I've actually tried that and it works - you get tons of weird bots this way, because selection is not so hard anymore. Your bot counts shoot up as well, so can't really run a sim this way for long.

jknilinux:
shvarz-

Hmm. Extra energy, instead of slowing evolution, speeds it up... That makes sense, in a weird way, but how does it do that? What prevents the bots from devolving, now that they are given so much freedom?

Or, perhaps, that was only a brief period- like lowering costs for only a million cycles, then raising it back up to where it was before to allow evolution to start again with all the weird new life forms it just made? That may be one answer, though unfortunately it requires having really low costs for a while- meaning about 50,000 bots on average, meaning 1 cycle per month on average...

Ta-183:

--- Quote from: jknilinux ---shvarz-

Hmm. Extra energy, instead of slowing evolution, speeds it up... That makes sense, in a weird way, but how does it do that? What prevents the bots from devolving, now that they are given so much freedom?

Or, perhaps, that was only a brief period- like lowering costs for only a million cycles, then raising it back up to where it was before to allow evolution to start again with all the weird new life forms it just made? That may be one answer, though unfortunately it requires having really low costs for a while- meaning about 50,000 bots on average, meaning 1 cycle per month on average...
--- End quote ---

It doesn't prevent anything from devolving, it just makes it harder for mutated species to die off. Makes selection more forgiving of slight alterations.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page