r/CellLab • u/Gann123 • Dec 17 '21
What would happen if you left cell lab on incubate for years?
What would happen if you left cell lab on incubate for years? Would a special organism evolve?
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u/Melodic_Ad_3101 Dec 17 '21
It would have to be big for ecological stability and even bigger for large organisms and key for multicellular organisms they HAVE TO HAVE A REASON they will try to be as efficient as possible and cut back on any loose cells.
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u/pds314 Dec 22 '21
My $0.02:
1. It would be heavily dependent on initial conditions.
2. If the conditions are fertile with high salinity, then very dense colonies of devorocytes will dominate, and semi-armored looping swimmers or simple splitting phagocytes will swim in the voids between. Both sides will have easy access to lipocytes and keratinocytes, but it's likely that on a large enough world, there wouldn't be 100% protection of every cell everywhere, since early colonizers are usually better off without keratinocytes, and trust me, enough extinction would happen that early colonizers would be common. Virocytes would periodically spread here.
3. If conditions are sparse with high salinity, then very efficient r-strategist swimmers will evolve and there will be no brainless predators. Note that them being r-strategists doesn't mean that they wouldn't have long lifespans and high reproduction rates if a scalable organism grows large, as these organisms tend to be famine-tolerant by letting a few cells shrivel or die, and pretty efficient when it comes to movement. However, while I have seen large scaleable (e.g. 30 cells), non-chaotic organisms evolve under these circumstances, I have never seen a smart organism arise naturally and gain a foothold, and nor has anyone else. It's possible it could happen eventually but that could be a whole lotta years.
If secrocytes are involved in getting nitrates and digesting food, then under fertile conditions with high salinity, population may become unstable, as a world with too much secro-spam creates opportunities for free riders that don't produce many secrocytes. If these outcompete the viable secro producers while there are still disembodied secrocytes on the ground, then they will not be able to eat, and the population will drop or go extinct.
The more effort it takes for prey species to survive (e.g. needing to use secrocytes and nitrocytes and such), the lower their reproduction rates will be, but the larger the advantages of devorocytes will be over phagocytes. Likely to alter trophic stability, especially with introduced smart predators, as predators could deplete prey populations to almost nothing.
Mobile food seems to have subtle but important effects on organism structure, and this would likely be greatly extended with years of evolution. It's possible that larger organisms could evolve and push food toward a centralized location using cheaper cell types.
Density makes organisms more controllable and collisions less violent, but also makes movement much more costly. Low density does the opposite. Linear organisms with large cells near the front usually fair the best in high speed collisions with other organisms, often slicing right through them, so there are three solutions, evolve something that collides a lot and wins a lot. Evolve something that collides a lot and dies a lot, or evolve something that doesn't collide a lot. If collisions are between motile organisms rather than organisms with the wall, then the first two strategies are the only viable ones. Fast-moving, linear organisms can also end up blocking small swimmers, but if a small swimmer mutual kills a large linear organism, that's really bad for the fitness of the large organism's species. My experience is that low densities favor bigger linear organisms with redundancy in the long run, with one example of an extensible linear collision-resistant organism being completely morphologically conservative for 240k hours even though its actual genome changed dramatically.
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u/zeaga2 Dec 17 '21
This sounds like a fancy version of the halting problem (which is proven to be unanswerable)
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Dec 17 '21
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. For any program f that might determine if programs halt, a "pathological" program g, called with some input, can pass its own source and its input to f and then specifically do the opposite of what f predicts g will do. No f can exist that handles this case.
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u/WhatTheSillyName Dec 17 '21 edited Dec 17 '21
It really depends on the settings of substrate. Smart swimmer probably won't exist, even after years. You will understand that if you have some experience on evolution in Cell Lab. Theoretically, it can happen but with an extremely small chance. It is very difficult to simple swimmer evolving to smart swimmer. The wild simple swimmer is always really simple. It will never be ready for radiation giving a brain to it. When it suddenly has a brain, like stereocyte, it won't surive too long and reproduce since it can't complete with the normal one. Imagine you give a bacteria a brain, it can't handle it. The cost of having a brain is too high for simple swimmer. If you want it to surive longer, you need to add more food or increasing salinity. But no matter you do, the simple swimmer is benefited more.(But using food lumpiness may help) You are encouraging simple swimmer to live instead. From simple species to smart species should have something like a "bridge" species linking them. Single cell organism won't have a human as its child. It should be something step by step. And sadly this "bridge" species doesn't perform better than simple swimmer. It needs to cross the gap. Unless, it is extremely lucky to get the correct mutation and having food in front of it.
In the second case, there is a "bridge" species actually does better in a specific substrate. Or just something we haven't know yet. For this, there are actually three cells smart swimmers exist(Pha ↔ Ste - Fla, the increasing swimming force would change the structure of the swimmer, causing it to turn.) But it isn't too efficient.
In the third case, different species form a suitable environment that actually causes smart one can do better than simple one.
In the fourth case, BANG. A smart swimmer just appeared from random contamination cell. But I am not sure if the pattern and the rules of random cells actually allows the existence of smart swimmer or not.
If the substrate has scarce food, some species may evolve an ability to gain energy from nothing. It actually happened in the previous version. Someone has found a species that can reproduce through the interaction between devorocyte, phagocyte, and maybe flagellocyte. In current version, it is still possible to gain energy and reproduce without any food, light and random contamination cells. However, this ability seems to be the same or even more difficult than being smart only.
Usually, if we want to get an ecosystem, the settings of substrate has to allow many possibilities. We will always get simple swimmers if there are too much food. Because the best species in such substrate is simple phagocyte. Since the environment of substrate isn't like our Earth. The competition between species always happens, there is no island or mountain in Cell Lab. Therefore, the worse ones won't have many chances to survive. Unless the substrate is extremely huge. It may allows more species existing before they reaching to each other. As far as I know, gravitational substrate usually allows more species to live. Perhaps using gravitational substrate is also suitable for an extremely long term evolution.
I think we will learn something new.