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[alfie275]

Mind if I post?

My idea is an organism that uses silicon from the silt to produce photovoltaic electrolysing fuel cells (reffered to as PEFCs) which it uses to make quartz.

This is the first stage;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fig one shows cell, note deflated PEFCs. As you can see in fig 3 there is no quartz in the cell wall, allowing for larger area to perform transport of substances. This cell descends from stage 3 to the silt at the bottom of the water.

This is the second stage of the organism:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The red bits on the edge of fig 2 show the organic parts of the cell wall that hold the quartz together and control the diffusion of particles. The yellow and blue thing is a PEFC, the yellow contains p-type silicon suspension, which when in light looses electrons to the n-type, making it positive, which means it attracts hydrogen attoms and takes their electrons, the n-type gains electrons from the p-type and attracts the oxygen, losing it's spare elctron to it in the proccess.
Once it has collected enough quartz in its wall, it will increase amount of gas in PEFCs and float upwards.


This is stage 3:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[IMG=http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/3238/stage3.png][/IMG]

In fig one you can see that there is a thicker outer wall and thin interior walls seperating the different areas. The areas with red dots in contain the majority of the PEFCs in the structure, the green ones in the middle ring contain nuclei that are running the structure, in the middle is where the genetic exchange & cell creation takes place. The outer wall is made of fully crystalised cells and flow control cells (seen in fig three as black and red respectively). The structure (about 2 cm in diameter) floats in generally shallow areas, lower in the water at night and higher during day.

[Shoku]

A: The purpose of this is not really to create novel cell processes. Bacteria on Earth already have an astoundingly vast range of chemistry they carry out to survive in various environments. This is more about macroscopic life and the body shapes.

B: Can you picture a soap bubble with bits of quartz in it? It wouldn't really work because of how the bubble membrane functions. The bubble is just a glob of material like any other but the reason it makes that shape is that the molecules are trying to play keep away from the water on one end but are drawn to it at the other. This is why bubbles pop when they touch something dry- with the thin layer of water interrupted there's no longer any force holding the other material in a membrane shape so the whole thing quickly comes apart as it starts trying to act differently.

You can't really stick quartz into that shape. Either it attracts the tails, in which case they would form a thin layer on it and you'd have no workable curve to move away from it with; you couldn't ever get the membrane to continue away from it. Or it attracts the heads like the water does, but quartz isn't polar and even if it was water would be more polar so water would just whisk the quartz away.

C: There's still a way to gather up quartz around the cell though- maybe. Proteins are a highly varied lot that can easily have sections that can easily have sections that attract the tail end of membrane molecules and other regions that are more water friendly. As such it's very easy to have them sticking out of the membrane and on the part that sticks out from the body you could have some structure that specifically bound to quartz. I'm not sure what kind of protein would grab a SiO₄ molecule or even fit into a mesh of them but it's fair to say that there could be one.

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Now, I'm tempted to turn this away like the last time I saw it but I'm tired of things moving so slowly so welcome aboard. Now there are electric plants floating on the surface of the ocean however implausible. Silicates are quite common so I'm sure they'll grow to abundance.

Now would you like any involvement with what we've been working on?

[alfie275]

Yes, I may not be as active as you two though. Maybe have a summary of all life forms on first post or something?

[Shoku]

Problem is I can't remember which came from which.

We've got four lineages now though. Yours, shelled bacteria colonies, the balloon types, and the most recent addition that has yet to be touched, octobrachius. A few feeder tentacles up front, some jets in the rear, and eight arms rounding it vertically. I've got some comparably extreme variations to that one lined up for when I hear about how it deals with food waste.

[Supermikhail]

First. Wow, this has gone some weird direction. Octobrachius is supposed to be a descendant of a shelled colony. The latest addition is still unnamed, and as far as I remember, it hasn't evolved beyond a dangly strip of flesh sometimes rooted with a thickening to the sea floor, sometimes freefloating.

Second. I couldn't sleep for about 3 hours last night, partly because my sister decided to throw a party in the next room, so you can imagine I had a bunch of thoughts bounce around in my head, healthily interspersed with various emotions. So, in no particular order...

Yeah, I should finally get to drawing these things. It's not so hard, although now is not the best time in terms of university assignments... Problems, though: the colours of these things which I've done by mashing all the light pastels together, and it's kind of a bother, not being able to decide on anything in particular... And the background - if it's for a thumbnail, it should be distinct, but what colour: blue, as if it's in its native medium, black, white, or what?...

And which ones to draw? Starting from the beginning? And how do I decide which intermediate species to draw? Like with this latest addition... Anyway, what's the point of doing it palaeoantologically? It's not like it's not confusing enough with only the current species... Plus, if only the current species are visible, it's easier to see what you have to evolve. Although...

Carl Sagan has brought to me some interesting ideas. For example, it's unlikely that a species will lose some organ or tissue entirely in the course of its evolution whether its beneficial to replace it with something or not, just because the existing organ takes part in some essential process, so the species will not survive without it.

Another idea is about the stages of an embryo. It appears to go through all the preceding evolutional stages not... well, to show researchers that we, indeed, are bald monkeys... but because evolution, struggle for survival hasn't impacted the development of an embryo... So, I derive from that, that we've got in our genes all the evolutional stages of an embryo, and we needed to, we could evolve back and start off from some earlier stage... Hm, no, that doesn't sound right... We couldn't. But a species whose embryo somehow can participate in the struggle for survival, even if passively, could evolve backwards... So, if I'm right, palaeontological tree could be useful in some cases...

These ideas have born something troubling in me. What if we really do not approach this project evolutionally sometimes? We just imagine things and forget to apply evolutional rules to them. Well, it appears to mostly apply to me... But I believe it could still be useful to have some sort of Code, a list containing rules which an evolution should follow. Like, Thou shalt not do away with an organ or a system entirely, it shalt live in the descendants whether in shape or spirit.

Another troubling thing, which makes me thoroughly confused, is about intermediate forms. I feel that there may be some truth in this argument against Darwinism. Every species would be an intermediate form if there were only single specimens found of a species. But in many cases, several specimens of a single species are found. As if there was a distinct, stable slice of evolution. A stable, non-intermediate species. What do Darwinists say to it?

And I think that about wraps up my nocturnal ramblings. One more, almost entirely cosmetic thing is that I decided it's pretty silly to start research of alien life in a lab. I'm gonna try to bring it onto the planet, taking robots with me, of course. But here I need advise - what's the best reasonable place to put the base in: on land, on water, or on a dirigible in the air? Should there even be a base? Humans could direct robots from space, right?

Last thing. For a week or at least a couple of days, if everything goes well, I'm not going to be able to do any graphical contributions. So, I don't know, it's probably a good idea to prime our internal visualisers.

[Shoku]

Yeah, I kind of crossed some wires there. Octo was my next trail of thought and I lost the first one.

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Which species aren't available though? You keep just ditching what you've made to make a new descendant from burger (which really confuses the relations in my head btw.)

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Yeah, people had this misconception about what vestigial organs are for the longest time. They'd always talk about how it was only vestigial if it had lost all function but that's obviously not the case because you could just get rid of it. Vestigial actually just means that the function is greatly reduced from the ancestor, like how ostriches still have wings but they're just for some balancing instead of flight.
In a lot of the more extreme cases though vestigial organs remain because they are important during development. You can't usually go taking out major bones like the pelvis even if you're rid of legs simply because so many other things figure out where they should go based on it taking up space early on. Of course, after they have started growing you can just halt the organs' growth because that was it's last important milestone.

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Yeah, Haekle's drawings gave everyone the impression that there was the entire evolutionary history of a species in it's embryo but that's not really the case. Unfortunately he bent the truth quite a bit there. We can just stick actual photographs side by side now though and the similarity is apparent, though to a less extreme degree.

It's like my vestigial organ example above. You need what's there at the start in order to figure out where other things go. In the case of embryos growing more complicated this means that you do indeed get quite a bit of it looking like the ancestral species but with a new layer of stuff on the end. I can't really give any rules for when you can or can't take steps out of embryo development but luckily it's not very relevant to this project because fantastic adaptations for surviving inside of an egg aren't all that visible after birth. You can pretty much intuitively grasp that it takes food to grow from one cell up to a baby and that's all you should need.

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I'm trying to be lenient to encourage creativity 
But I definitely nudge you away from slashing out organs and that as I see you trying that sort of thing. I guess if I were motivated I could make a compilation post about nuances I've brought up. Short description of "the rule" followed by a link to the post it's in wouldn't be hard to put together so much as it would be time consuming.

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Darwinism isn't a thing n_n
That particular term is actually mainly used to try and make science look like a competing religion here in the states. Instead "what's modern evolution have to say?" should get the meaning across without stirring up my memories of Young Earth Creationists.

Anyway, sort of yeah. I've said before that species that are thrown into a new environment change fairly quickly to fit into it better but then slow down as it becomes challenging to make other refinements that actually help fitness. Even so they do still evolve. There are just a lot of cases where the ancestor species didn't really have to make major revisions.
Well, look at goats. They do pretty well in mountainy areas. They are basically very fit there. It would be hard to flat out design a goat that could do what they already do but better much less produce one in a series of mutation size steps where each has to be at least slightly better than what came before it. As long as they have cliffs and things they're not going to change a whole lot. Maybe making the bladder 5% bigger or shifting some crest on their skull a few millimeters would give some slight benefit but natural selection has basically already chosen most of the beneficial mutations that were likely to happen. Given a lot of time they might stumble into some series of mutations that opens whole avenues for greater fitness in the mountains but it's harder to get at those.

But imagine if suddenly some goats had their mountains taken away and had to live in the swamp. Usually alligators and things would just eat them all and you'd have a dead end but let's pretend that they happened upon a swamp without predators that could actually kill them off like that. They'd get stuck in the mud a lot and probably get sick pretty often from nasty food they weren't accustomed to and various parasites and so forth. Suddenly it has become very very easy to improve upon their design... for swamp living. Change the color so they blend in better, maybe make their legs squat and thin their hair and so forth. Instead of taking thousands of generations for mutations that were better than what was already there to show up it might take just a few dozen.

And like I've said species can change a lot more radically when other species are suddenly removed from a system.

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Actually given the distances involved we'd almost have to send robots that could direct themselves. Even just controlling little rovers on Mars gives about a ten second delay between what they're telling it to do and the images sent back. And all the overhead of life support equipment just makes a ship even larger. When we find the first planet with things growing on it we probably wouldn't be ready to send people but we could reasonably send robots ahead and maybe have the people show up later.

But like you said with the paleontology bit before: it's confusing enough with only the current species. Research of the life on a planet like this would only see the life that was currently around, and we'd probably not run into a planet so early in it's evolutionary history at all. At best they would eventually find fossils of these things but they'd have met most of the contemporary life on the planet by the time they could dig around thoroughly enough to get collections of fossils that really gave a fairly clear tree of life.

[alfie275]

I have an idea for a mutation of Donutsaur:
The bit holding the gas becomes bigger, so big that if it eats enough it can become airborne. Now they wouldn't have any control but the wind blows them around and when they have not eaten in a while they start to descend. I can see this species spreading about pretty fast, and even reaching inland lakes and landlocked seas.

[Shoku]

It take a LOT more lift to get flesh up into the air and without control wouldn't most of them just land on land or deep water where they would be SoL?

[Supermikhail]

Edit: Ninja'd. Anyway, my thoughts:

A couple of problems here. First, with how the gas is produced, I don't think it's lighter than air, maybe somewhere close (depending on the composition of air, which probably doesn't have a lot of oxygen and carbon dioxide which are some of the heaviest gases in our air; donutsaur's gases are waste, so lots of hydrogen sulfide). Second problem is that Donutsaur isn't adapted to air. So, it flies, it dehydrates almost immediately. Plus radiation.

I, however, wonder if your quartz bacterium could change its life cycle a little. Like it is, all other organisms better just get away from the places where there's a lot of it. But if its rising and sinking cycled not during a day, but during a year (in winter it's on the bottom, recharging, in summer it floats near the surface), it could be something to play with. Namely, there could be a lot of potential for symbiosis.

[alfie275]

Yeah that does make sense.

Maybe a possible mutation could be that it releases the waste gas as a defence mechanism?

[Supermikhail]

I hate to be on the prosecution side, but Donutsaur's gases are currently in a closed balloon-like structure (with a semi-penetrable membrane, yeah, but still), and the only way to rapidly release gases would probably involve puncturing of an internal organ, which is far from an acceptable loss in this case, since the gases in the organ would quickly get replaced by water and the donutsaur would sink... But, for that there is a solution. I've long mused about compartmentalizing Donutsaur's balloon, for example into three compartments. Now it can release gases from one compartment and still stay afloat with the other two compartments. Of course, it would still need to have a puncture in its outer skin.

[alfie275]

So, if a predator attacks it and punctures its skin, the gas would be released, but not sink the donutsaur?

[Shoku]

Go ahead and compartmentalize thing all you like n_n

But really can you tell me if octobrachius poops? Spits up anything it didn't absorb?

[Supermikhail]

Sure. But octobrachius or that unnamed rooted thing? Octobrachius excretes all its shit into the same channel going to jets where its gametes go.

The rooted thing, however, doesn't have any appropriate channels, so I would imagine it simply excretes from a side of its root, seeing as the root seems to be specialized in secretion and excretion.

[Shoku]

Whoa, that sounds pretty complex all of a sudden. There has to be of this control so that squeezing the water parts don't jet back into the reproductive organs or screw up whatever its "secreting" waste. Is this a continuous tube from the mouth to the jets or is there a little one way stomach that sends stuff into blood and then some kind of kidney organ to filter the waste out?

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I didn't get the impression that the rooted one had complex organs.