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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLOSED DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM. "The digital organisms are self-replicating computer programs, however, they can not escape because they run exclusively on a virtual computer in its unique machine language. From a single ancestral "creature" there have evolved tens of thousands of self-replicating genotypes of hundreds of genome size classes. Parasites evolved, then creatures that were immune to parasites, and then parasites that could circumvent the immunity." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

LARGE VOCABULARY. “Decoding chemical communication in nematodes. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans produces tens, if not hundreds, of different ascarosides as pheromones to communicate with other members of its species.” https://lnkd.in/dXsN6Pj View in LinkedIn