Evolution may give rise to less diversity then previously believed

[jerrywickey]

My First Colony early evolution simulation software is spitting out some very interesting results.

 

As some of you may know from following my previous posts, I wrote this software to explore the immediate precursor protein of Myoglobin. The software has since taken on a life of its own. Dr. Alex Aller validated my software in a very interesting discussion with him at his home in our home town of Key West FL.

 

I have been running many simulations and reviewing the results. My software outputs a file logging the entirety of the genome of every organism in every generation and tags each with a serial number so that it can be traced back to its original replicator and follow each and every mutation.

 

I naively believed that I could simply open this output file and look over the genomes to discover how many different specie of first replicator arose after a thousand generations and after ten thousand and so forth.

 

Here, one can see the new replicators have nearly dominated all the available nutrients.

 

I should have realized but I soon found out, this output file quickly grows to hundreds of mega bytes and contains the genomes of millions of organisms.

 

So now I am writing software that sorts out the millions of bugs into respective species and counts the populations. So that I can compare the resulting populations with the run parameters to discover what effects what.

 

Here, the second advantageous mutation (in bright green) has taken strong hold and nearly wiped out the weaker replicators (dark green) with only one mutation endowing replicative advantage. The weaker species is now nearing extinction. It has evolved to its limit of evolution, but has not demonstrated nearly as much variation as I had expected.

 

So far it does seem that evolution, when pressured by limited resources likes to find a superior organism and favors it so strongly as to possibly deselect all weaker ones. Which seems counter intuitive, since pre-Cambrian O2 producers would then have been expected to have produced prolific numbers of evolutionary interspecie offspring. This is however, not what we observe.

 

www.satellitemagnet.com/firstcolony

 

 

Since we do not know what the RNA sequence endowing replicative activity actually was in the first replicator, the user can arbitrarily assign the sequence as well as assign advantageous and disadvantageous activity to specified sequences.

 

The software logs to a user specified file the entire genome of every organism in each generation. It assigns each a serial number so that any organism can be traced back to its original replicator. Be careful, this output file can easily be over 100 megabytes.

 

Mutation rates are completely user alterable.

 

Robustness of replication is user alterable.

 

The number of nucleotides is user alterable.

 

I have not written a manual. You are welcome to email any questions.

 

The web site provides a short tutorial.

 

Jerry

[lucaspa]

Jerry: "So far it does seem that evolution, when pressured by limited resources likes to find a superior organism and favors it so strongly as to possibly deselect all weaker ones. "

 

I've got a thread around here on the "three forms of natural selection". Natural selection has 3 forms:

1. Directional

2. Purifying or stabilizing

3. Disruptive.

 

People who have not studied evolution tend to equate natural selection with only the first: directional. This is the form that alters a population over generations to new traits and/or species.

 

However, it should be obvious that once a population is well-adapted to an environment and that environment is stable, then natural selection is going to "purify" the genome and eliminate all the variations that are not as good as the best one.

 

Congrats, Jerry, but you just re-invented the wheel. But thanks for the additional data on purifying selection.

[jerrywickey]

Thanks for the compliment. But I was more interested in understanding it in depth than reinventing anything.

 

I find learning is much better then just reading.

 

Jerry