Month: September 2022

EVOLVING DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM. "Hyper-parasites evolved which subvert parasites to their own reproduction and drive them to extinction. The resulting genetically uniform communities evolve sociality in the sense of creatures that can only reproduce in cooperative aggregations, and these aggregations are then invaded by cheating hyper-hyper-parasites." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL ECOLOGIES. "Diverse ecological communities have emerged." https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

MODEL SYSTEMS. "These digital communities have been used to experimentally study ecological and evolutionary processes: e.g., competitive exclusion and coexistance, symbiosis, host/parasite density dependent population regulation, the effects of parasites in enhancing community diversity, evolutionary arms races, punctuated equilibrium, and the role of chance and historical factors in evolution." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

FLY IN OINTMENT. "Most evolutionary simulations are not open-ended. Their potential is limited by the structure of the model, which generally endows each individual with a genome consisting of a set of pre-defined genes, each of which may exist in a pre-defined set of allelic forms." False assumption given what we know about horizontal gene shuffling. (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY. "The work presented here aims to parallel the second major event in the history of life, the origin of diversity. Rather than attempting to create prebiotic conditions from which life may emerge, this approach involves engineering over the early history of life to design complex evolvable organisms, and then attempting to create the conditions that will set off a spontaneous evolutionary process of increasing diversity and complexity of organisms." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN SHADOW. "This work represents a first step in this direction, creating an artificial world which may roughly parallel the RNA world of self-replicating molecules (still falling far short of the Cambrian explosion)." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

FOOTNOTE. Was the Cambrian explosion an artifact of massive geological events that wiped clean a vast swathe of biological history in most of the globe? The idea of the Cambrian explosion has been deeply embedded in biology, but begs more questions than it answers. Hold that thought for another time. View in LinkedIn

MUTATING REPLICONS. "Once the soup is full of replicating creatures, individuals are initially short lived, generally reproducing only once before dying, thus individuals turn over very rapidly. More slowly, there appear new genotypes of size 80, and then new size classes. There are changes in the genetic composition of each size class, as new mutants appear, some of which increase significantly in frequency, eventually replacing the original genotype." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

"A WATERSHED in the history of computing. It has long been observed, rather wistfully, that in principle the world's computers sum up to one gigantic parallel processor, and that the crushing bulk of that metacomputer's CPU cycles goes to waste, unused. Only now, however, with the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, safely and sensibly." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

UNIMAGINABLE. "Trying to imagine the marvels that pour forth once you've successfully tapped a computer as elaborate as the Net is as futile as trying to map the future of a society, or of a life – or of life itself." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn