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[Shoku]

Yeah, with that lateral gene transfer and so on the path is treacherous enough that I didn't really want to go from a colony up to some animal but just start with the earliest thing you'd call an animal.

But seeing as you've spoiled yourself and are now roughly subject to the same problem I've been you may as well check out porifera. They're more organized than just some colony and even have a few cell types.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Um9KGn0zszQJ:cfcc.edu/rogers/courses/msc174/Lectures/Phylum%2520Porifera.pdf+porifera+anatomy&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgHUfAGh7Az0BkM-WXRXXSbwLfGBGVqgYdErntz-r3fsFBD3RvJZ9oGeZmYLwDeRwtB9x1SQsuJKceyYAmvN5ZB_WLSieGvTeXyF6Ggl9uZbtD5_UeinAhCZWuKGAYRnY9yLL4-&sig=AHIEtbT1cRBSQAK9d0VDWjAYKyodWyhR8w
The tenth page of that show how the organization varies after the other basics are laid out but I don't think the whole thing really comes with enough exposition. I recognize things easily enough what with already knowing but without that anyone else would probably need to ask a few questions to follow what's going on.
Still. Basically how a pre-tissue body would work.

So enough with the cell colonies. Let's just go right to the lifeforms that have recognizable impact on the forms that come after them.

[Supermikhail]

So what do you want me to do?

I thought if we're going to evolve it, let's evolve it as early as possible for it to make sense. And if we're going to just pick things out of thin air, we'll be better off googling bizarre creatures, because anything we're going to come up with (or at least I am) is likely to exist on Earth. Those sponges are icky. Also, I didn't realize that flagella can do so much, and their only function in my mind up to this point was movement. It either says you've got to have education in biology for this project or a fine critical mind.

[Supermikhail]

Actually, I just thought it might be a good idea to pick one real animal and try to evolve it so that the evolution doesn't exist on Earth. At least to prove my idea that nature has explored all ways, wrong.

[Shoku]

If you're scrapping all the species you came up with then the immediate goal is a creature with skin, muscle(nerves), a gut and some sort of mouth parts. The muscle should probably be involved in the mouth but let's just go and say that it needs some form of movement right from the get go.

Now, I'm thinking I'm going to have to work out some guide to underwater lifestyles. I wanted to just introduce things through prompts but I have too many untouched prompts floating around.

-

Well it's like a fan. If you root the fan in place it will move the air around, if the fan is more mobile it won't move so much air because it will move itself instead. And I guess if you made the air very close to immobile the fan would just about only move itself like some kind of digging machine-
but anyway I think there was some kind of disconnect in my trying to communicate that it takes much more specialized tissue to produce a strong jet than to have a fin that you just waggle about. A row of flagella is really just a fin with a bunch of holes in it- they still get the job done as there's a good deal of surface area but if you've got even more surface area you can wave the thing fewer times to get the same effect.

-

Basically I just want something that's not a worm. I'm not quite comfortable just saying "use a jellyfish instead" but I could rig up a chart of all of the big adaptations of worms leading to vertebrates and arthropods and then we could make a little exercise out of forcing a round peg through a square hole to make jellyfish based life that fits into the same niches.
Does this sound appealing at all?

[Supermikhail]

Argh. I don't know anything anymore. Although, yesterday, when I was falling asleep, I had this idea:


Those hard-edged things in the pyramid iteration, float into a tube which was formed by erosion and now has a strong vertical current, and stick to a side. Water flows through hollow spaces between pyramid edges, and soft tissue around them collects nutrients. I suspect that's a dead end, though, as they are very specialised and stationary.

[Supermikhail]

I've just solved my theorem that says that you need to be at least an undergraduate in Biology to successfully participate in this thread. My solution goes like that: to stay flat you've got to have muscles that pull your top to your bottom. Also, this blows my mind. Just read that in the Invertebrate Zoology, and I would have never guessed that myself.

[Shoku]

It depends on how accurate you want to be on your own. I've got a very real role here specifically because other people are probably not that familiar with the physics of life.

Instead of putting it off until you know more just do what you can with what you know now. Even if it becomes some total failure the ideas make their way out of your head and we may be able to use them later.

-

So yes or no for the jellyfish exercise?

[Supermikhail]

Re your first paragraph: And then you asked me what tissues burger had, and I had no idea.
Re your second paragraph: And then you asked me to draw a genealogy tree, and I asked you what colour donutsaur's skin was.

-

Yeah! I suddenly changed my mind, after remembering how Carl Sagan spoke about humans genociding other species with advanced intelligence. I suspect that any species except stationary may be capable of evolving into a green alien, only all its attempts are killed by species that already evolved there. So, I'll think about jellyfishes and flip back a little as I skipped from protists to bilateria.

[Shoku]

Re your first paragraph: And then you asked me what tissues burger had, and I had no idea.

I asked for skin and muscle right from the get go~

Re your second paragraph: And then you asked me to draw a genealogy tree, and I asked you what colour donutsaur's skin was.

When did I give you the impression that I don't think you're doing a good enough job of trying?
But as for the tree I was confused about which species came from which. Typically we've got to make these things branch a little more and not just star out of one point so much. I've got an idea for that this time though- we could do a timeline. I don't actually care about how many years these things take and trying to be realistic about that feels like it would be a waste of time but we could keep track of steps.

Each species present at the time couldn't lead into more than two species in a single step. Most of the time one of those would just be roughly the same as the ancestor but if the ancestral form stopped working very well abruptly we could get two changed lineages out of it, or at any time we could have only the one carry to the next step.

Yeah! I suddenly changed my mind, after remembering how Carl Sagan spoke about humans genociding other species with advanced intelligence. I suspect that any species except stationary may be capable of evolving into a green alien, only all its attempts are killed by species that already evolved there.

Well sort of. Nature's got this general trend of having the smallest brain that gets the job done. Typically you see brains get bigger for social living and in marine mammals because they need to be able to judge how long they will hold their breath to do things underwater. Those never really make anything like humans though. There are a lot of small factors that come together but to try and pick out the most prominent thing that lead us to this kind of intelligence doesn't take too big of a leap. Our brains are obviously over sized and there's a very common sort of evolution that leads to things being too big or flashy: sexual selection. Thanks to other factors we got to a point where the general environment around us wasn't the biggest concern for us staying alive- rather the new biggest source of death was ourselves, or our own species anyway. At this point mothers would make the best investment by finding mates that weren't as easily killed by other humans, and once that sort of cycle were in place there would be a constant pressure for not just having a brain that was big enough but a brain that was bigger than that of everyone else.

All of the unusual stuff that came together for humans would probably not happen all that often and I wouldn't expect there to be all that many other ways to get to a point like this. Certainly a few should work but on our planet we had this stretch of time lasting hundreds of millions of years where dinosaurs took up most of the niches for large life. That itself ought to be evidence enough that there's not any particular bias in life for creating civilization. Sure, on all one out of one planets with life we know about we did eventually show up but as a species we haven't been on the planet for very long at all and we just sort of dabbled in art for untold ages before we stumbled upon agriculture and started writing and so forth. Maybe those were inevitable or maybe we make those leaps by the skin of our teeth.

So, I'll think about jellyfishes and flip back a little as I skipped from protists to bilateria.

Well jellyfish can be startlingly complex
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Haeckel_Siphonophorae_59.jpg
but rather than try and handle all of that the typical dome shape seems a better form to go with. Picture an umbrella with a pocket up in the bell. That pocket would be the stomach and would open up near the center. You're no doubt familiar enough to tell the dome end apart from the tentacle end but there are two structures there that can be hard to make sense of- the small spindly lines and the big lumpy things that dangle around more in the middle. Those parts in the middle are called oral arms and usually have sacs that the larva do some early maturation in and as you may have guessed are involved in getting food into the mouth. (I'm not totally clear on how- it takes a lot of precise aiming to physically grasp something and then move it to a location so this is probably more automatic, like if little hairs just move anything in a particular direction.)

The small tentacles I would just omit for now- stinging wouldn't accomplish much before there were things with nervous systems around (the oral arms also sting in some species but here they serve a more obvious purpose for us.) For nerves they have one or two rings near the edge of the bell and they have the simple sorts of eyes that can work out the direction to bright light.

I'm just going to let that sink in before I go saying anything about worm evolution.

[Supermikhail]

Whoah. First and foremost. About the number of participants and the influence of individual post length on it. I suspected it myself, but then I mentioned this thread in another thread, and one guy's impression agreed with my suspicions.

We've got here a lot of posts that are tl;dr, and that's basically what drives most people away - they get bored (or confused). We should keep our characters in check. If you really need to make long sidewinded points, than you can probably

• pull Inception and use incomplete sentences and short gaps in reasoning;
  
• or post some less relevant things on a blog and link to it;
  
• or, at this point most of this thread can be handled via PM without any harm to its purpose.
  

Or use fancy formatting for more visual variation.

Anyway, that section about human brains. I meant that human apes killed other apes, except for gorillas and chimps, because those hid very well. That is, brain selection not when they still were a single species, but when they were separate species.

     Also, thanks for shaking my beliefs once again with that jellyfish image. So you can survive pretty well even if you've got a lot of dangly soft parts. And I have always been trying to make my creatures more compact, more slick.

           Also also, I've got a new idea about streamlining illustration process. One particular and very annoying hindrance for me is that there's a kind of a chore involved when I transfer an image from my physical paper medium into a computer image. I want to reduce the frequency of this chore by packing more creatures into a single image, that is, I want to do a whole (branch of) genealogy tree on a single sheet. A3 sheet, so a lot of creatures, which means going without visual identifiers for some time.

[Shoku]

I made more effort to identify the tangents early on and always had that "I'm going to ramble, you don't need to read that stuff" clause in the first post.
I'm terrible with incomplete sentences though. Even including all of the detail people missed the skin and muscle thing somehow.

I'd intended for more pictures of things but for a long stretch after you joined the thread I'd been having computer problems and didn't really have access to my digital art tools. Since I got them back up and running I've just been in a rut.

-

It's not like we go around exterminating dolphins or pigs when they get too smart though. It was only the other primates that used weapons we went after.

-

That was actually a colony of squishy things. Jellyfish usually bud off of the ground portion in big batches at certain times in the season so that they have abundant food. Most animals avoid them and they are made of water to an even greater degree than other things so the few things that will eat them aren't numerous enough to threaten the average jellyfish.

-

So should we just give the creatures a letter-number designation? It would make referring to them right now easier but I don't know how long the convenience would hold.

-

But overall yeah, the organization for this has been a big thing I've been paying attention to. I'm not subjecting you to the first idea I have for how to change it because wildly shifting the format of the thread seems like it would be more harmful but, well, moving all of the Carl Sagan stuff to PM would probably be good. You seem interested enough and I guess I'd resigned to you being the only other person here.

[Supermikhail]

Interestingly, I've already been giving creatures numbered designations when uploading pictures, not consistently enough - burgeridae and donutsauridae somehow ended up under number 1, and then the rooted creature went under number 2, although these numbers were supposed to mean different strands.

Does "digital art tools" include a tablet? It would be nice if you used it here, for me to melt in awe and envy each time you upload something, as I can't afford one so they seem to me like telephone to a 19th century person.

[Sorent]

Hello first time posting on these forums myself. I have read this thread up to about page 8 and had to stop there due to time constraints. I am wondering if it is too late to participate? I have recently had a real facination with just this subject. I even went so far as to self educate myself on early cell structures and how plant and animal cells first started to differ. My spouse holds a degree in biology. We have had discussions on this subject. If this thread is still open for comment please just tell me what type of organism you would like me to start with. I do plan on reading the rest of the thread when i get more time.

[Sorent]

Alright I went ahead and skimmed the rest of the thread. Wow you two have been going back and forth for some time. I'm impressed. Some great ideas as well.

I had an idea for more rapid organism development. Basically what I am having a hard time finding is reasons for each of your creature developments. I may be completely off topic but isn't the reason for a change to a creature just as important then the change itself. Basically without some kind of external stress on the creature wouldn't any mutation just either completely not work or just blend into the rest of the genetic mutations due to being no better or worse then its sibling species?

Now I do not claim to be an expert or even as educated as the two of you on this subject at all but it seems to me that you could come up with genetic mutations based on one or more of the following external pressures to any organism.

1. Competition by another creature: Living organisms are constantly evolving to out compete their neighbors for resources and space. This does not apply to competition within a single species because for the sake of a species survival there is no distinction between a given individual and its nearly identical genetic cousin two inches away that happens to be stealing all of his food.

2. Drastic changes in environment: An example of this could be a slowly rerouteing river that is gradually decreasing the salinity of a tidal region. This could mean that the vast majority of the salt adapted creatures would die out but those that happened onto the secret of freshwater survival would be the kings of that environment and receive all of the resources from it for many generations.

3. Increased reproductivity efficiency: From my own private musings I would assume that this has a much grater evolutionary weight to it then more normal functions of life. As far as I can tell adaptations are really split into two groups those that allow procreation and those that allow survival until procreation. So I would think that this would be a very good incentive for adaptation.

Now in order to combat these pressures the creature can adapt in a number of ways. From what I can tell at first there are very few ways a bacteria (or whatever the starting form is called) can change in order to overcome the challenge. This leads me to believe that the more complex the creature the more possible mutations that can overcome any given external pressure. So I think it would be a good idea to list the early stage developments that could overcome the changing environments the creatures live in.

1. Change in Mobility
2. Change in reproductive system
3. Change in energy acquisition system
4. Change in defensive mechanism or behavior(Are behaviors covered in genetics?)

My proposal is that you take your creature and then apply one of the external pressures to it, then figure out an interesting way to use one or more of the possible genetic developments to overcome it.

Now obviously this is not nearly a full list or quite possibly even close to accurate. In fact I am half suspecting that I am way off topic. However, I am just writing this in hopes of maybe joining the conversation and giving y'all something to think about at least. Please feel free to amend and change the short lists I came up with just now.

[Shoku]

Yay new blood.

Let's see how well I can do the whole brevity thing, err, being brief.

A. There are basically two kinds of evolution. Slow refinement and the more rapid change due to environmental stress- wow, it almost hurts not going into detail about those.

B. The last time I made some creatures I had reasons for the adaptations but I wanted to hear what other people thought they could do first- maybe get some extra inspiration. People probably missed that because I'm so long winded.

C. I actually already touched on the salinity stuff but we decided to wipe the slate.

D. I could rattle on about that till your ears bled- there's a seemingly endless number of factors that go into quite how things reproduce. Only thing I think I can describe shortly though is survivability curves.
 1. Some animals tend to mostly die very young so they make tons of babies. These mostly survive better when they are bigger.
 2. Some animals just die at a pretty steady rate at every age.
 3. Some animals mainly die in old age, like humans. Not very many children in this category but each one is worth so much more to the parent.

E. Bacteria change a whole lot. Just not in ways that make the basic form of their cells much more complex. They're much more 'gain one thing lose another' with the kind of thinking I want for this project.
Actually I want to skip way past bacteria. If you've got a good idea of what a protist is like we'd be starting past their branch of the tree of life. So like muscle and skin and such.

F: Most animal behavior is genetic. It's only once you get to animals that there's all that big a learning from living component involved.
But yes, I was going to pose pressures to overcome with this. The thing is just that selection selects from variation so you need variation first. We didn't ever quite get that rolling the way I would have liked.

G: The lists are accurate enough, at least for the early stages of this.

-

So we might be starting a little art exercise with making a jellyfish body accomplish roughly the same things a worm body did on Earth here in a bit, before trying to create "The first animal" again. Mikhail isn't pleased with the stuff he tried to do before he watched a bunch of Carl Sagan and looked into various aquatic lifeforms. I say he opened Pandora's box and made it a lot harder to contribute to this project but oh well.

Anyway welcome aboard. If you'd like to not wait for me to set that up and just dive into sketching stuff or whatnot go for it. I may reject stuff for our stricter start but everything's a learning experience.
-plus if the lifeform isn't very effective that just leaves more room for us to make it good at things.