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[Shoku]

Yeah, I haven't been sure quite how much to burden people with per contribution so I haven't pushed things much.
As for talking about things for days you tend to ask me what I think about this or that and I'm all too willing to ramble. The size of the steps you seemed to be making seemed a bit encouraging for it as well.

As for setting up trees you can use a variety of those thought-web programs to just make bubbles with lines connected by hand, such as http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm, or you can try to draw the lines a bit more mathematically. Unfortunately there's not really something I could find that will just let you type words in with lines drawn for you.

Fortunately these things are dead simple to draw.

With a large number of images to fit in it can get a bit crowded but nobody is saying that you've got to draw the whole tree at once- you can just draw until it's cluttered then snip off any branches that keep going and draw them on their own. There's no meaning as to which thing goes on the left or right so in my example image they just tried to keep the longest lines from changing direction too often.

Because we actually have the species that sits at each junction you'd want to draw the lines in pencil or space them with a ruler if you were doing it by hand but with some imaging software it's pretty simple. Well, if you wanted to go back and do some pen drawing of everything on it's own and at a size that would fit right into one of these I could put it all together no problem.

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I don't know about the rendering methods. There's a lot of variation to the kinds of textures of living things but honestly you can't really tell what the fine details are in a microscope. That sounds kind of backwards but the shadows cast on all the edges and blurry parts make for kind of a confusing level that you just learn to not bother with. Multiple focal lengths for microorganism observations wasn't a luxury I had.

[Tuxman]

Hey guys, we have been brainstorming about making creatures from the get-go, but truly we have been doing it in a flawed way.

We are basing all our observations and predictions off of cells. Cells are great, but they don't have to be the only form of life.

Think about it: the only reason cells survive is because they can reproduce (in the beginning, it was, at least). What if we propose a different basic form of life. Something that can reproduce, just like the first cells did. Then we can work from there.

I know that there aren't any forms of life besides cells that we know of, but shouldn't the idea work? If we could (today) engineer an object that's only ability was self preservation and reproduction, it wouldn't have to be made of cells. It would only have to be able to survive and reproduce.

Back during primary evolutionary stages on earth, bacteria basically soaked up nutrients and sun, and became larger until they split into to. The hunter cells (eukaryote cells) would swim until they hit something, determine whether its food or not, and act accordingly. If a simple, yet different form of life could form these same setups, then we would have a different form of life on our hands. Not cell based life.

Am I making any sense here?

[Shoku]

Yes, you could do it with things other than cells but- well I've got several things to say.
Cells are an easy way to make chemistry happen. Different molecules will react different ways under different conditions (such as different acidity) and cells provide an easy way to create a certain set of conditions for chemistry on their inside that is different from their outside.
Nonetheless when you have things that make copies of themselves, have variation between each other, and that variation passes on to the copies then yeah, some are going to do better than others. If there is a constant source of variation, meaning that the copies are not always exact copies, then they should continually adapt to anything that doesn't outright kill the lot of them.

I could say a bit about what other sorts of things would be likely or good replicators but that would be getting quite a ways away from what this is about. I started this to say that you don't need to replace cells with something else to get different sort of life. I don't even think you need to have different tissue types to come up with very unique creatures.

But ultimately there's something even more powerful than that. It doesn't matter very much that these things are made of cells. I have intentionally left all of the details of how cells interact with each other out of this exercise (well I explained a few things when asked about things but they don't impact how we're doing this.) These things just have "skin" or "muscle" without any concern for how those structures arise from cell or not-cell. The skin or a shell are just outer layers and most of the things you might picture in place of cells would still benefit from having a particular layer act as barrier between the internal portion and the external. If you want to imagine that these are made of tiny robots go for it.

And if this approach seems like it's cutting too much out for you? Well just look at these


Now can you tell me that you have any idea how the form of the first one influences the form of the second? The first is basically what our ancestors looked like before they became multicellular and the second- well what does that even matter? Most of it doesn't have any structure you could even recognize as coming from cells and in the space at the bottom there are at least three different sorts of shapes you might think were cells and if you do actually look at it long enough to figure out which ones actually are you still couldn't make any meaningful connections between them and the first picture. "There's an inside and an outside" would be true no matter what the replicator (unless I suppose if you could make some sort of Klein bottle replicator but even so, what would that matter at larger scales?)

No, this project is about giving evolution a real place in the process instead of just intelligent designing the whole thing. I think the best place to start is on Earth with things that are already somewhat understood even by people that just paid attention in high school biology. Yes it is less ambitious but it is a much easier environment to sort out a system for a project like this and to simply show not just that it works but to give a taste of what it can produce. Exotic unearthly worlds and radically different building blocks have been done with those old and backwards systems yet yield no better results.

With people that really know their implications we could try them as well but even with my sights set so low as "make a shape with skin, muscle, and a mouth" this appears to be an unassailable mountain to most of the people that would like to participate.

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Though, if you could find a sufficient variety of people more interested in doing it that way I would gladly launch a parallel project, or if I found myself without sufficient time then at least endorse it.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah. That last part I like.

In other news, I've wasted some more time. Left computer working for the night, and now I've got something to use my Youtube account for. I present to you

DONUTSAUR VULGARIS Which was done, basically, to show that there are fewer straight stretches of gut than you might think. And to practice animation. And feel free to pause it and go through frame-by-frame, because I'm afraid it might be hard to make out details.

[Supermikhail]

Oh, forgot something completely in rendering rush. About reproduction. Trisgea rhombus. I though, what interesting things its whickers could do, besides feeding. Why not reproduction? They've got everything needed - they're tender, versatile, and reach far out away from the body. To reproduce the new generation of Trisgea Rhombus touch their whiskers. Also, sexual dymorphism. First, in males and females whiskers are coloured differently. Second, in males whiskers are long and thin, in females they are short, thick and slightly curled up. Also, I don't know how much sense child care makes at this stage, but females' whiskers could serve as shelters for young ones.

[Shoku]

That animation rotates it to show all the sides but I can't make out the middle section. The only straight part I ever thought there was is the part going through the torus, which was where I originally meant for it to spiral oddly enough.

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Color is no good- these things can't see yet so it would serve no purpose.
At this point there's decent incentive to get away from the parent. Without a lot of ways to tell their offspring apart from their meals there simply isn't much room for parental care. Now, if at first they are physically attached there then there would be little risk of them getting eaten and the parents could move them about looking for a few of their early meals. At some later point it could relax and stretch out or something to let them detach and then they could let the currents take them far enough away to have low risk of the parent eating them.

[Supermikhail]

Bummer. How about now?


Anyway, so how do creatures get coloursensitivity? I've got a suspicion that we aren't going to have it evolved unless we say we do; it appears to work in separate cells. Or should we first have a nervous system? Ah, I guess, I should have sorted these things out on my own long ago. Maybe I'll check out my library's biology section tomorrow.

[Shoku]

This is what I originally meant:

But the way you've done it works too so don't bother changing it. Or we can start with the subtle changes stuff and have two species with this little difference floating around I guess.

I've been doing this on the assumption of "nerves work." Trying to think of how to lay them down in every particular animal seemed like a pretty big request for people so basically we just assume that there's a network in place that works. Right now just picture sort of a loose mesh that goes out to any part with muscles. All of the branches of the tree of life with nerves eventually end up with some central spots where "thinking" type stuff goes on and not so central spots where just messages are conveyed to muscles or back from sensory organs.

Eyes start out as light sensitive bits right on the skin. The donutsaur has just let gravity kind of influence it's mouth end to swing down but you can probably imagine how currents could set it swinging around and how that might make eating a bit troublesome. With some method of manually controlling its orientation and swimming about (like it should want after that plants prompt) it would have a little more concern for which direction was up. The sun gives a pretty obvious clue about this so that's one good reaosn to just be able to sense light and dark. Light levels don't quite change fast enough at different heights when a body already has buoyancy pushing it to a particular level in the water so that reason would probably not be any good.

I can do some other prompts for eye advancement later so don't expect reasons for color variation too soon.

Edit: mmm, mmm! I love me some .jpg files.
The artifacts on that are really horrendous. I'll have to remember to save any files of yours I draw on as pngs.

[Supermikhail]

Erhm. I feel like I got lost horrendously somewhere on the way. What "plants prompt"?

In any case, I've got some mesmerizingly other news on mind. Today, as I promised, I visited my library's biology section, and oh saint mozilla, such sweet books and ideas! The one I started reading, called "The Phenomenon of Life", by a Russian geochemist Eric Galimov, deals with the very origins of life and touches on the anthropogenic part of the Universe. First sweet idea that I got from this book was what you've already talked about - that apparent limitations of human mind are there to make absorption of information easier. Only Galimov says that they are also what created and drives art, literature and science, etc. onward. And the distinguishing feature of human intelligence is its ability to predict events, to mentally model experience to base its actions on. So brain simplifies everything to arrange things in predictable patterns, or patterns from which predictions are easy to make. And when humans got some free hands they started to bring these simplified patterns out into the world, and that's how our technology, architecture, etc. originated, because they aren't for survival or well-being. With all the technological advancements, a large part of humankind starves just like it starved 30 000 BC. Or may be even worse than then... Mindblowing.

Other thing that I was reminded of by this wondrous author is that apparently data has been accumulating that says that evolution happens much faster than we think. Also Galimov provides examples of shortcomings of Darwin's theory, namely, lack of fossilized intermediate forms, need of a mutated trait to spread from an individual to the whole population, not necessarily beneficial nature of intermediate forms of an eventually beneficial trait... So, what I'm leading all this to, is, while I'm lost on the plants prompt, to try to radicalize our evolutional process. Say, it doesn't happen via accumulating small mutations? Well, that happens, too, but what drives life forward (to further decrease enthropy) is radical breakthroughs that happen when conditions change as radically, and species are desperate for a mutant with a beneficial trait because only it can carry the torch onward.

I propose to modify the process this way - during a "meltdown" period we come up with as many variations and different lifeforms as we can. Then we make it "ice age". Otherwise known as a prompt. That is, we come up with some critical condition (the crazier the better) that tests the abilities of our creatures, and limits the direction of evolution. During this period we frantically brainstorm some lifesaving evolutions and sift through unfit species with prejudice.

How's that?

In other news, a proposition to restrict 3D visualization to special cases, especially those requiring display of movement, and for quick sketches - an even kookier idea. I've just bought a pastel kit, which I've got no experience using, but I'm itching to obtain some.

Edit: Heh, I thought you didn't care about graphics.

Edit edit: While I was looking for weird creatures to practice my pastel on. Do you think you could help me identify this one?

[Shoku]

Oct 13
"To spice up feeding habits we need a source of foodstuffs that's not the same as these free floating bacteria and the tiny offspring of larger things. After the long wait of the creatures seeming to move toward stable forms it seems fitting for there to be green plants to offer larger meals spread out over greater distances. In this case a greater distance could just be several body lengths away for the donutsaurs so it's probably time for active movement."

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Yeah, the wikipedia style links between things in our mind do a lot more than just slice out information. Cross links between things inject all of these double meanings into our languages and we even tend to have our senses cross over. You probably don't think that things smell particularly blue or red but there's a good chance you would agree with connections of that sort involving certain other sensations; a lot of the great creators find some cross signal between senses nobody else realized they had before yet once we're asked we find ourselves saying "yeah, this music does sound like a pineapple."

It's not exactly that our technology isn't for wellbeing. It most definitely makes certain people much safer and secure than they would have been, we just let the same unfortunate people fall through the cracks- or sometimes new unfortunates if we've done a particularly bad job of things. We're reaching a level of interconnection where we can't exactly let some country just let it's people starve anymore though so maybe we will really put some devotion into helping the rest of the world soon. We haven't had a very good understanding of people for all that long- and really we try to stay pretty ignorant about it with the welfare of others being such a politically and religiously charged subject. Far too many people just tell themselves "the world would fix itself in just a few years if we went with my plan!" and then if it doesn't it's just "those morons interfered constantly! It's no wonder they stopped it from going anywhere!"

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There's been a lot of confusion about intermediate forms over the years. You can get an adequate understanding of it by looking at whale evolution. We knew pretty much what sorts of land animals they were related to due to this bone peculiarity and that but for a long time people thought that something that spent half it's time in the water and half out just wouldn't work. It would be clumsy and blind underwater if it was any good out of it or vice versa so it should just get destroyed by predators. Then one day we found a fossil pretty clearly between whales and their land bound ancestors. It was just at this particular beachy area and once we knew to look there we found all these other fossils along with this whole lineage of transitions that obviously worked better for the population that earlier forms.

In reality all forms are transitional forms, it's just that a few suddenly transition to a point where they can live in a much larger environment or a much smaller one. The limited ones are a lot harder to find than something that lives in, say, ALL of the oceans.
You can have some exponential growth rate with a beneficial gene spreading through a population but the fact of the matter is that it can spread through a group living on a particular couple of beaches a lot faster than it could spread through animals living all over an entire continent. Cases where mutations that weren't beneficial have a big impact on the evolution of a population mainly just show up when a few organisms got blown out onto an island or some such and then without a buffer of a large population one of the first generations on that island suddenly found that they only had that particular gene instead of the four or five common variations in the population back on the main land. Same story if virtually everyone dies and you've got an Adam and Eve sort of situation on your hands (this is called a bottleneck, reflecting how a once wide population is suddenly truncated to just a few members. Cheetahs seem to show evidence of this in recent history. Well recent on geological timescales anyway.)

You do only get so many fossils so you're probably not going to have hundreds of steps you can line up and often times a lot of the fossils end up being from some side branch that started going in another direction but there's still enough to go far and beyond what you need to piece together the sequence of traits that really lead to whatever change into the form that Galimov is apparently calling not-transitional (cuz never mind all of those variations we can see arising once whales spread out- it's only a transition when we haven't found it~)

But yes, the sudden changes have got a place in all of this. There's just one problem: the environmental shifts that drive sudden changes also kill a whole lot of species. With what we've got right now about one or two species might squeeze through and as such we would have a mostly empty ocean with some single cellular life floating around and as much as two types of creatures feeding on it. Or in other words it wouldn't really accomplish anything right now. Once you have more connections between species a big catastrophe can have you taking the loose ends to desperately tie anywhere they can connect.
But even if we did rain death from the skies what kinds of forms would you give these things anyway? You've already been taking stationary type clams and turning them into miniature torpedoes that seem like they would perform the acrobatics of a fighter plane.

Are you just looking for a way to skip forward to something like a complete fish with all of their organ systems and things? If you've got ideas in between that you'd like to try you can hold off on integrating them into a creature and just ask me what I think of the body parts themselves. Evolution is neat in that it sort of tries everything once it has got the parts available.

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That's just me complaining about file types. Jpg files are really pretty bad for the internet because you save it, open it back up for a webpage to show it, then save it again so after several hops it ends up with a huge mess all over certain parts of it.

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That looks similar to a horseshoe crab though it's got some obvious differences from the typical horseshoe crabs I'm familiar with. The tail is more like their relatives, the extinct sea scorpions. I don't know enough about variations of horseshoe crabs to say if this is some living (transitional) fossil or just a less publicized relative.

[Supermikhail]

Okay. Didn't quite catch that as I had posted my reply before reading your edit. But we're go for crazy producers, right? Then I'm gonna collect my ideas for that symbiont lumpy bank-crawling creature. Or are we supposed to try to catch them?

That's gotta be a horseshoe crab. I love these buggers! Probably because they remind me of my child love, trilobites. Something's weird with their Wikipedia page, so, while I was trying to find this critter's name in Russian, I stumbled on a page I couldn't resist.


 

Oh, fiddlesticks - everybody's a transitional form. I should have known that writer's trying to play something, as today the discussion turned suddenly into thermodynamics equations, and bored me completely. However, his book came in the company of two others, namely Invertebrate Zoology, book 1, by Ruppert, Fox, and Barnes, and The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan - it's about the evolution of human intelligence, not exactly on the subject here, but I just couldn't let go of it.

I guess I'm gonna work on diversity first before we make a catastrophe. I hope that it'll give us an opportunity at very high specialization or something because of very strict conditions. As for diversity - how about that rhombus now turning its whiskers more towards the front and reopening a squirter channel there? With its whiskers, when there's a prey nearby it can snare it, after launching itself to it with an especially strong reactive push. Then the rhombus uses the front squirter to draw water in, thus creating suction to have a better hold of the prey, and maybe even, while it is being digested, suck nutrients in. Or, if the prey carries a shell, suck its flesh out. Also, the rhombus uses its hind squirters in reproduction, launching its children out behind itself. Its children are conceived and develop at beginning stages inside a parent, pretty much at its core, where two hind squirter channels join together.

[Shoku]

I figured you never saw my stuff between edits because of the usually large delay between our posts.
These would be just larger plants. As I didn't think plant evolution was as intuitive I figured I'd just leave them out of the picture except to say what sort of food availability they represent.

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Yeah but there are only a few species of horseshoe crabs. I would think that fishermen would pretty much recognize their local variations but this thing some rather significant differences.
It's definitely in the general trilobite branches of the tree of life though.

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I'm not sure when the book was published so it could just be older attitudes. Science tends to distance itself from certain misinterpretations that become popular among groups trying to be... unscientific.

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It is getting a bit difficult to recall which creature is which and how many there are. Would you like to do that thing with giving me same size pictures to stick on a phylogeny tree?

[Supermikhail]

I thought you'd never ask. Starting tomorrow. Although, I must say, all of them are pretty clear in my mind except that it feels like there's a ton of them.

I just had one more idea. So, suppose the one you called a torpedo finds itself a nice place with very strong currents - in theory, it could lose almost everything of its anatomy except for the whiskers that could turn into a full-fledged sail... so it basically would be a jellyfish, but turned 90 degrees around the X-axis. Or it could have several separate fins to direct itself.

[Shoku]

This is kind of getting to a point where I'd like to say that you don't really need huge body parts for underwater mobility. In retrospect I dislike a lot of what I've done because it's fairly easy to have moderate buoyancy anyway so I've kind of failed to emphasize that being able to barely do something is great when nobody else can do it. A short ridge that can wave around works as a sail at small scales- well,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1SupCtMtH4&feature=fvw
If you pay attention you can see an edge of the fishtank this video was shot in. This creature is a comb jelly and the size is probably between the length of your pinky finger to maybe a little bit bigger than your fist. And those tiny ridges on it? Not even a flap of skin. Those are rows of cilia so it's like just having fingers come off of cells and flap about. In not having a shell these don't really have to do very much to push themselves around. Eventually you can't go faster doing something like this, because things like sharks don't do it like this and nothing like this ever became shark sized. Nonetheless there is the question of "why does an animal need to move faster than this?" Pretty much in order to escape from this thing or chase it down to eat it.
A more powerful question, though, is how safe is it to move faster than this if you have no way of telling that you're getting close to jagged rocks?

Now obviously you probably wouldn't use a row of strings flapping around to move something without knowing about them but there is a lot of room to start small with movement and have a long drawn out arms race as different animals compete with each other.
...and with arms race you think back and forth retaliation in quick succession but in reality it would be much slower with one group gaining a few percentages point advantage over the other growing slightly larger populations until the next step when they'd suffer a little bit as the others grew in number somewhat. So it shouldn't be like pokemon where water attacks on fire creatures are "super effective" but rather like designing a car- by making something more rigid you probably make it weigh more and maybe this is a subtle but noticeable improvement.

So with this I think I've got another way to alter what we're doing. Do you think it would be possible to, instead of thinking of a good way to use some method of propulsion rather think of the body part (such as the water jet,) and draw like eight bodies with jet(s) positioned differently? We could then have somebody else come in and put in their own interpretation of what these setups would be good at or which one would be best for some particular prompt? You could add your thoughts after and generally talk about it as we tend to if you wanted but I think we can move forward a lot faster if we're not trying to decide which option would be best ourselves but rather just make reasonable variation.

[Supermikhail]

I decided to start with a sketch for your consideration



Basically, I'm asking how hard they are to make out and figure out. Except for N12, who I got from a bad angle, and it's a recent addition. It's the guy that ensnares its prey with its whiskers. However, the whiskers come in two layers - one is for ensnaring and immobilizing, and after that's done, the second bunch comes in; thick and tender whiskers stick to the tender bits of the prey and work their poison and digestion magic. And afterwards suck in the juices.

What has been omitted from the sketch is donutsaur's spaceship evolutions that I currently can't figure out. You said that one of them grows in length and... ah, the donut turns into a spaceship, right?

I guess, your suggestion could work, but we first need a third person for interpretation. And I think we're talking about the same thing, only a little differently. That is, to get as much variation as possible, and only later deal with selection. The two ways (making a cataclysm, and pitching the creatures to a third party) can work together, I think.

... Hm, N10 is pretty crappy, too. I'm still trying to figure out how I'd like transparency to work. Well, I hope these things sticking out of its mouth are a good hint.

Edit: Forgot. This article seemed relevant to the thread.