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[Grakelin]

Nothing. I'm not going to work on it myself because the idea is about shuffling things between people.

Alternatively: a 4 year degree in 6 years, err, I mean Biology.

I've run into two or three top downers, about eight people who said they were interested and disappeared, and about four people who might have had a learning disability that prevented them from understanding that I was asking people to draw things. Most of that in places other than this thread.

This has been flat out the only location where people have told me about similar projects other people are working on. Overall I'd say the major failing point has been that people didn't notice my emphasis on evolution. Like the mutation and selection kind. Everyone that sticks around until their reason for leaving is clear either wants to build Aristotle's ladder or doesn't realize that's what they're trying to do.

So what you're saying is that you're upset people aren't building this world and setting for you within your specifications, but you aren't willing to actually do anything yourself?

[Shoku]

Nothing. I'm not going to work on it myself because the idea is about shuffling things between people.

Alternatively: a 4 year degree in 6 years, err, I mean Biology.

I've run into two or three top downers, about eight people who said they were interested and disappeared, and about four people who might have had a learning disability that prevented them from understanding that I was asking people to draw things. Most of that in places other than this thread.

This has been flat out the only location where people have told me about similar projects other people are working on. Overall I'd say the major failing point has been that people didn't notice my emphasis on evolution. Like the mutation and selection kind. Everyone that sticks around until their reason for leaving is clear either wants to build Aristotle's ladder or doesn't realize that's what they're trying to do.

So what you're saying is that you're upset people aren't building this world and setting for you within your specifications, but you aren't willing to actually do anything yourself?

No you'd have to not read to think that.

Well, seeing as you didn't,
I already know the answers Earth came up with a little too well. Trying to tread between copying it and absolutely striving to do things nothing at all like it (meaning be stupid,) is kind of like trying to make a pen balance upright on a table. Almost everything I do is going to end up tumbling over into one of the two things I don't want.

NONETHELESS I've set up a world: Earth. And the earliest life: unicellular things. Oh, looks like we can tell which way my pen fell.
What I really need is for someone to throw a curveball. Make a multicellular critter that isn't what I expect. But people don't know how to start with that so I've also tried giving them the first "animal" and asking them to give it a shell, bones, or some other sort of calcium based structure. Well, I didn't say calcium based because that's scary chemistry even though the other two examples tell you calcium is useful for making hard body parts.

Not all of that was done specifically in THIS forum but here's what really bugs me: it's taken all this time for someone to even ask. Sure I've responded to your negativity in kind but where have the people been? The only people who have been asking me anything were missing the point entirely (cough Supermikhail cough)


But here is why I don't just draw up a planet: it would be totally distracting right now. The landmasses mean nothing. The ocean connectivity means nothing. We have a fairly thin slice of the water near the surface to work with. Places shallow enough to include some rocky purchase are just long narrow strips of mostly sand. Now if you're thinking to ask why I haven't said anything about this you're thinking too much. This is the default image we think of when we think of water. Either it's got some and a short ways down or it is effectively bottomless.

LATER the distinctions between habitats matter but right now there is just the one.

Edit: Jopax, I'm going for universal common descent. There are several types of bacteria but really they're just going to count as a thin soup of stuff to eat. Maybe if this makes it through an epoch worth of species they can start doing those other things people think of unicellular life doing but at this point they're metaphorically unaware of multicellular life because it hasn't been around.

Starting with "some plants" irks me a little bit. Well, show me that you can think up a form that uses photosynthesis but doesn't have any leaves and I'll give a green light to it but otherwise I don't want get distracted by plants. Animals are trouble enough.

[Supermikhail]

Not entirely! I just thought we could help-you-help-me. And I could swear I've read the whole thread, and it's been very funny, but there's been no sign of constructive advancements, I'm sure I haven't seen anything like you've posted now... Although, reminding myself that this thread's been around for more than half-a-year... Anyway, what I'd like to establish is whether you want everybody to invent crazy lifeforms, or base it all on evolution. My problem with the latter idea is that I'm not sure there is a scientific explanation yet of how and why it all happened as it happened on our Earth, so it's hard to imagine why and how life would evolve on another planet, especially in such early stages, of which there is so little fossil evidence. And if there is, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who is absolutely ignorant of it.

So, I'd sure love it if you posted an example, even if it's not a revolution in xenobiology. Just what we're supposed to be doing.

[Shoku]

People can go pretty nuts. Honestly I don't expect anything to top anomalocaris but I'd love it if we ended up with similarly bizarre stuff. No perpetual motion machines or force fields please but just looking at all the different organs animals use for seeing bio has a pretty high ceiling for what already exists.
So a lot like the tone of DF: it's a fantasy setting no doubt but fairly grounded without steampunk machines tearing through the landscape or any of that.

As for the why of various lifeforms it most often just came down to right place right time kinds of things. The first bacteria with some ability to stick to a surface no doubt did a really pathetic and overall bad job of it, but because it was the first that could do that it could live places other bacteria couldn't and even in places other bacteria were it might have been able to get at food sources they couldn't really access.

The first creatures to see obviously didn't have camera eyes like ours and in fact it would be pretty ridiculous to think they could even really make out shapes of any sort, but just a yes/no signal about light is very advantageous if none of your competitors or prey have ever so much as seen it.

The first way of doing anything is clumsy really only just barely does it but once the option is there that whole survival (and reproductive success,) thing refines it until you've got a masterpiece quality mug. Sure it started out as a chair and you can see how the chair was beaten until it worked like a mug but it is still a mug and a great one at that. It's nothing like what you would get if you went trying to draw a mug in just the one step and even drawing a bunch of little halfway points between a chair and mug would be selling it short by a lot.

So really this is about the now, not where you're going to end up. And if it's possible forget about where you began too, just keep switching between changing it to do something better and to do something else.

[Jopax]

So if i get this right, you want us to begin with a bacterial soup then go from there.No offense to anyone, but i doubt there are many people here who would know enough about the early life to know how exactly it should happen, what would it need and what would simply be dead weight.I suggest you simplify it a bit for everyone, since not many people like to think about why would a piece of bacteria need thicker membrane or more incell stuff(I can't remember any of those things, i had biology four years ago).Let's start out simple, but complex enough to interest people.

[Supermikhail]

It's kind of interesting to think that random irradiation, toxins and errors in replication are called such a lofty word as "evolution", ain't it?

I'd say Jopax has made a very good point. I wanted to ask "so anybody knows how we got sexual reproduction". Instead I'll propose: let's have the climate so mild and undemanding for such a long time that there is no need to go sexual, and see how far we can get. I don't know, everybody spawns?

[Shoku]

So if i get this right, you want us to begin with a bacterial soup then go from there.No offense to anyone, but i doubt there are many people here who would know enough about the early life to know how exactly it should happen, what would it need and what would simply be dead weight.I suggest you simplify it a bit for everyone, since not many people like to think about why would a piece of bacteria need thicker membrane or more incell stuff(I can't remember any of those things, i had biology four years ago).Let's start out simple, but complex enough to interest people.

That's just it, there is no reason exactly.

Muscle, skin, and nerve cells. Can you think of ANY shape to put them in for eating bacteria? You will probably want a mouth but what else? There's not even a demand that it be able to move around by it's own power at this point.

-

*This isn't required reading or anything. Just read it if you're curious about the point of sex (or the immune system at the bottom.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sexual reproduction has a few different things going on but the central point is that when you've got two copies of a chromosome you get two benefits. A: functional genes on one can often take over for defective or less-functional ones on another (such as ones that got shut off altogether,) and B: when you split them up for your sex cells they swap bits and pieces between each other. With asexual reproduction you've got to get 1 useful mutation and pass it off to offspring and then they have to wait around for another 1. With sexual reproduction two individuals can get useful mutations and then bring them together like A. With a little luck the kid will bring them together on the same chromosome like B when he goes to have children and then voila! You've got two good mutations in the same stretch of DNA.

Ok, what's actually used a lot more often is putting two BAD mutations on the same stretch of DNA. This is pretty useful because after you get one good mutation you're probably going to get some bad ones before you get another good one. By the time you've finally got a bunch of mutations that are the start of growing, say, wings, you've almost definitely got a bunch of mutations for heart defects and maybe some wonkey kidneys too. Bacteria are pretty tiny so it's no problem for one to turn into a billion pretty darn quick. With numbers like that it's no big deal if bad mutations pop up, they just die and you've still got many millions left over waiting for their next good mutation.

So as you get bigger, say, big enough to eat other bacteria, you start needing more time to grow to that size and reproduction slows down. At some point it becomes a really huge waste to just throw away children because they got some bad mutations. That's where swapping genes starts to be worth hunting down a mate.

Now the first ways anything did that were genderless. Just anybody with anybody. Gender comes from sperm and egg and those come from a pretty simple relationship. There are two ways to give your offspring a good chance at survival- make a whole lot of them and make them big. Obviously you can't make a whole lot of big ones- microorganisms pretty much make as many as they possibly can of whatever size. So a few big ones or a ton of tiny ones. But wait! Sex takes two so you can do both of these things.

And then as is often the case animals specialized in doing just one role because they could do it a lot better if they weren't trying to do both. If a certain species I've looked at and prodded with a metal wire quite a bit is any indication it is pretty easy for males to reproduce when they're surrounded by hermaphrodites so they'd come first among the little creepy crawlies.

And then at a point where it starts to be even worse if your offspring die you start wanting things like a complicated immune system. You'd need about the size of a whole genome (which varies a lot but just hear me out) in order to store the instructions for all the proteins our immune system makes to fight off invaders. Obviously we don't carry around billions and billions of genes custom tailored to every little virus and pathogen. Instead we have roughly ten to really do most of that with. Thing is we found a useful trick in damaging them- if you chop the parts up repair mechanisms will just put them back together any which way. So instead one gene is multiplied into many and- well it will be easier to show like this.
Take any two numbers from a row and multiply them. You can take the same number twice.
(10, 13, 10, 8, 51)(41, 18, 2, 3, 21)
(10, 13, 10, 8, 51)(10, 13, 10, 8, 51)
Which row has more possibilities?

The real benefit though, is that your children have a very different immune system than you. If some superbug should come along by dodging your immune system long enough to adapt to it suddenly everyone with the same system would fall prey to it (short of an effective quarantine.) Instead if something comes along and figures out just how to wreck you they're still pretty much clueless about almost everyone else.

You know how we have A, B, or O genes for blood type? (AB is just what it sounds like.) Well instead of three variations the most critical immune system genes have hundreds. Hundreds of possibilities for column A and hundreds for column B. Each possibility turns into the many billions of proteins your white blood cells use to sniff out pathogens so there are very few ways for one disease to wipe out many of your children.

So that's why we reproduce sexually.

[Jopax]

Righto, this headache isn't going away and i really can't do much with it, so let's try this.

The very first lifeform on the planet was the Trisgea bactery, it's origin is in the northen pole's warm oceans, rife with nutrients and minerals coming out of the very active volcanoes and geysers dotting the place.The bacteria itself is very simple, floating around and absorbing stuff it bumps into, mostly nutricious chemicals(do these even exist on such a small scale?) and some lighter mineral particles that float around, mostly silica based ones.The bacteria gains energy from dissolving the matter it absorbs(i really can't think of any other process than one using oxygen, if you can think of somehting that is at least plausible, please do so) and most of the stuff it does not dissolve it simply dumps out, or in case of minerals it integrates them into the organism itslef, building a kind of thin shell to prevent damage, once the bacterias lifespan of a few weeks passes it withers dumping out most of it's internal "organs" and the thin shell itself slowly floats to the bottom of the ocean.

This good for a start?

[Shoku]

Seems complex. Do I need to know what silica based minerals are like? Do the shells just pile up till there's a thick layer of them at the bottom of the water?

I'm kidding. Sort of.
What does it matter what the bacteria are called? I've already said that the water we're starting in is full of bacteria. Obviously there's some variety to them but it's not so complex that what I asked for has to have a way of screening them. Because nothing big eats them they don't have an defenses against the new proto-animal I've asked for.

But if you really insist on not doing anything with skin, muscle/nerves and a mouth I can do that step too. I worry that that will be crippling to anybody else really stepping in but from what I hear the place we're at now is paralyzing anyway.

So sure. We can use your bacteria and your planet but not with the freeze phase or at least not how it sounded. Hibernating bacteria would just be slow.

-

More infodump. Aerobic vs anaerobic life.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Using oxygen from the get go doesn't make a lot of sense. It basically burns everything it comes in contact with if not carefully regulated so having it around at all isn't very conductive to the materials life is made out of before they're actually inside of and possibly protected by life. Abiogenesis is enough of a gray area that we could have life go ahead and use it anyway but on Earth the evidence points to life just breaking up materials it could find until some bacteria figured out how to "burn" a select thing. The cell anti-burned it to burn some other chemicals but it was just a waste of space until it could be reset like that. So oxygen made a lot more energy available from things like sugar.

Of course sugar came from something that figured out how to grab light, water, and gas from the air so more energy from sugar turned oxygen from poison into a really useful substance and life picked up the pace having so much more energy available.

So if you care about the chemistry we'd definitely want something like that to be present before multicellular life.

[Supermikhail]

Shoku, you remind me of someone from BBC. I really dig your style.

About reproduction: yes, sexual is faster and more adaptive, but it's aimed at the survival of the species and individuals, not at evolution. And it's not like in the brainspace time is a problem. Just a thought.

About oxygen: how about liquid ammonia-based life? Xenobiologists speculate a lot on different solvents and structural components. I don't think we should be so pessimistic.

And. I don't know how relevant it is (probably not relevant for quite a while), but I've come up with an idea for a statistics-based imaginary struggle for survival. Basically, we create an organism (evolve an organism from something before it), and turn its properties into sort of functions, well defined and sort of mathematical. For example, birdotherix - can fly, burns X kcal per hour, speed Y m/sec, take-off speed Z m/sec. So we take it by its functions, then we take a pool of survival situations, and randomly choose a defined number of situations against which to test birdotherix's functions, for example - a predator attack, a draught season, a forest fire. And "see" how well it fares. Although, there is a good chance it won't fare well against the forest fire. Well, what can you do? Survival of the fittest! And a sprinkle of random.
Just an idea.

About Jopax's bacterium: How do reproduction and a mineral shell work together for a unicellular organism? Does it have shed it before reproducing, by any chance? Or dissolve... And imagine, at some later time it evolves into a monster that dissolves bones of its victims.

[Jopax]

Well i was thinking the shell itslef does not envelop it completley, a hole is left for absorption of usefull stuff and "squeezing" out copies of itself
Also on the freezing thing, i don't think it matters right now, since most of the life is in the liquid oceans which are always warm due to the volcanism, also rather acidic because of it.Plus due to the water anomaly bacteria should be able to survive anywhere, just have to get adapted a bit.
Okay, someone else evolve it?
Let's say that with the increase in bacterial life in the ocean has made it harder for our little critters to survive, it needs to adapt, needs to be more efficent at getting food, how does it do that?

Also, the name is there so that once (if) we finish this we can easily place them all in a big evolutionary tree and see what we get

[Shoku]

Survival of the species vs the individual is all wrong. It's survival of your offspring that matters. There's some math involved if you want to narrow down on exactly how your own success is not exactly the same as your children's success but to keep it simple only the ones that act in their own interest stick around for very long.

Spoiler: We're Carbon based lifeforms (click to show/hide)

We're not oxygen based life. The short way of describing it is that we're carbon chains in water that just happen to use oxygen in respiration. Plenty of life on Earth doesn't use oxygen so that's just a trait of our branch of the tree of life (well, it's closer to the trunk than a branch at that point.)
Now for life that was made of cells like we're used to there are indeed molecules other than water that could support them. The most important thing is being able to form a membrane but unfortunately the other substances are usually only liquid at much lower temperatures. I can't say for certain how much that would slow life itself down but I do know without a doubt that it would make the chemistry that lead up to life take an enormously longer amount of time. At lower temperatures molecules move around slower so you just have to wait so much longer for them to come together for reactions.

But it doesn't matter if individuals survive a forest fire. What matters is that at least a few survive and then recover. If you think you can set up some equations for that that we can do easily enough for hundreds of species (the idea's gotta be viable later, right?) then let's see it but after all that talk of "we don't know why evolution when this way or that" it seems better to keep it fairly arbitrary.

-

So when you said the planet just stops you meant just the outside of it looks frozen over?

...I meant to skip straight to animals. Bigger ones. If a bacteria was rod shaped or round and had flagella or not- can you think of any way that impacted the form of larger life? Those details all seem lost practically right away and anything present later could have just evolved separately.

But ok.
Trisgea lutum. The shell is reduced to just two plates and it secretes a ring of slime around itself. By sliding the plates in or out of the slime it can control how much contact it has with the acidic water. This is important because it gets it's energy from letting the higher acidity water flow in but it is a two step process where the other step needs to be more basic.

[Jopax]

I meant it stops completley, it doesn't freeze over the weather just stops, no winds, rain, snow anything, it seeminlgy becomes a big ball of ice

Also if it's not important we can simply skip a few million years and fast forward to some basic multi-cell organisms

[Shoku]

Alright. So skin, muscle-nerves, and a mouth (unless you want to think of something really different.)

[Supermikhail]

No-ho-ho! Shoku, you got it all wrong! That's not what I meant at all!

But it's not a scientific discovery, so no matter.

I propose that trisgea lutum gets a squirt drive - several canals through its body, into which it can semi-efficiently suck water, and squirt it out in other places to change the direction in which it's moving, or the way it's oriented - because all the best acid comes from below, from the volcanoes, and it needs more energy.

Anyway, what mouth? I thought we were feeding on sheer geothermal energy.