Foods role in teh promotion of Evolution

Evolution Pro                                     10/26/07

Problem
Does the amount of food present in a given environment directly correspond to the evolution of the creatures present? If this is true, then does a greater presence or lesser presence of food promote different amounts of evolution in the creatures subjected to the environments?

Hypothesis
I hypothesize that the amount of food present in a given environment will correspond to higher evolution of the creatures present, and that the creatures in the environment with less food will evolve more while the creatures in the environment with more food will evolve less.

Background
In order to properly understand the results of the experiment, one must be able to comprehend the software used to acquire the data. Evolution Pro is designed to be a highly advanced evolution simulation program which allows one to edit the environment and the creatures that will inhabit it. As it is said in the EvolutionPro instruction manual, “EvolutionPro is a versatile evolution similar that can be used in many ways.” Evolution Pro does not, however, attempt to recreate every single miniscule detail present in the real world. This is because modern computers are not capable of reproducing all the subtleties of the real world. Despite these limitations, EvolutionPro is still an extremely valuable and interesting program.
Each creature can be composed of up to 20 different body parts which all play different. Each body part present in a creature has a set chance to change, or mutate. Whenever a creature reproduces, its young has a set chance to either generate a new part in a square adjacent to an already present part, or have one of its parts mutate into another one. The ability for these creatures to change and mutate leads to their evolution and better adaptation to their environment. Generally, the mutation and changes caused by a result of this random change is bad for the creature, causing it to die off quickly. However, every so often, a change, which makes the creature far better at surviving in its environment, will happen, and soon that creature will be the dominant species in the environment.
Using the program, one can tweak the environment that the creatures will live in. This allows us to examine how changes in an environment an affect the evolutionary process of the creatures. Our problem requires us to change the settings of food in the environment, but deciding what amounts of food to use required some trial and error we discovered that the lowest amount of food that could be used was 75% of the default level, as any less than that would cause the creatures to go extinct quickly. The level of food present in the environment can be increased without worrying about the extinction of the creatures. In the simulated environment, there are two types of food; green food and blue food. In order for a creature to digest the food, they must have an eater with the same color (i.e. green eater eats green food only). Also, creatures can have omni-eaters, which process both colors of food, but only gives the creature a certain amount of energy from each color.
In the real world, there is a correlation between environment and the evolution of humans. Many years ago when primitive man was roaming the earth, he was primarily nomadic. However, once he stopped moving around, and began to grow his own grain and raise his own animals, man became more efficient at gathering food, thus leading to a more highly evolved version of man compared to the hunter-gatherers. However, I think that this would be the opposite of what would happen in the program environment. The creatures in the environment with less food will need to evolve more in order to survive the harsher conditions, where as the creatures in the environment with a lot of food will not have to develop intricate ways to gain energy, essentially making them the equivalent of fat and lazy.

Gathering the Data
In order to gather the data needed to test our hypothesis, simulations were set up which had all the default settings except for food amount and data collection. Right now we will look at the food portion of the experiment and address data collection at a later point. We decided that the optimum levels of food to test our hypothesis were 75%, 100%, and 200% of the starting levels. We also changed the amount of food present in each environment after every 200 cycles (the programs equivalent of a season). Originally, the numbers were as follows.

Green Food    Summer - 400    Fall - 180    Winter - 60    Spring - 180
Blue Food    Summer - 200    Fall - 90    Winter - 30    Spring - 90

These numbers were then changed to the following.

Green Food    Summer - 400    Fall - 180    Winter - 60    Spring - 180
Blue Food    Summer - 400    Fall - 180    Winter - 60    Spring - 180

Then the starting percentage of food (755, 100%, 200%) was applied to these numbers. The reasoning behind the equalization of food was that if both types were present equally, there would not be a deviation of the species leading to one type that preferred blue food and one that preferred green food.
In order to actually determine which creature is more highly evolved, we decided to use biomass. Biomass is essentially the size of the creature and can be derived simply by counting the amount of body parts present in the creatures in their respective environments. Though this is a good preliminary way to determine higher evolution, it would be a mistake to use it as our only guideline. As a result, we decided that we would pit the final versions of the creatures against themselves, essentially letting them “battle” to the death in a series of set environments. This way, we could see which creature is more adapt over a broad range of environments. The idea was to place 50 copies of each creature into the simulated world, and then see which one survived. When the two types of creatures were placed in the world, we expected one would be more proficient at gathering energy, thus allowing it to live and making the other species go extinct from lack of energy. Therefore, one could consider the winner of the battle the more highly evolved creature, as it was more adapt at gathering energy.
The data collection aspect of the experiment was not too complicated. We set it to minimum data collection on every 20000 cycles, letting us see all the basic information we needed to determine the creatures’ properties. We battled the creatures that had the highest energy at the end of a 24-hour period, and we did this by simply saving the creature with the highest energy, then loading 50 copies of it back into another world along with 50 copies of another creature. We ran 10 simulations each of the 75% food, 100%, and 200% food environments, therefore giving us a total of 30 creatures, 10 from each food setting. At the end of the project, we hope to be able to deduce that there is in fact a correlation between the creatures and the amount of food present in the environment they evolved in.

Data
Environment – food at 75% of normal    
Creature    First run    Second run    Third run
75% food    Last one standing,    Last one standing    Last one standing
100% food    Goes extinct right after 200%    Slightly longer lifespan than the first run    Goes extinct immediately after 200%
200% food    Essentially immediate extinction    Essentially immediate extinction    Essentially immediate extinction

Environment – food at 100% of normal
Creature    First run    Second run    Third run
75% food    Last one standing,    Last one standing    Last one standing
100% food    Lasts much longer than in 75% food environment, but eventually goes extinct    Does not last as long as first run, dies out not long after 200% creature    Does not last as long as first run, dies out not long after 200% creature
200% food    Essentially immediate extinction    Essentially immediate extinction    Essentially immediate extinction

Environment – food at 200% of normal
Creature    First run    Second run    Third run
75% food    Last one standing,    Last one standing    Last one standing
100% food    Stays alive for many cycles before finally going extinct    Stays alive for many cycles before finally going extinct    Stays alive for many cycles before finally going extinct
200% food    First one to go extinct, but lasts longer than it did in previous environments    First one to go extinct, but lasts longer than it did in previous environments    First one to go extinct, but lasts longer than it did in previous environments

Data Summary
It can be clearly seen that the creature that evolved in the 75% food environment was the last survivor every time. The creature which evolved in the 200% food environment was always the first one to die, and usually did so extremely quickly. After that, the creatures, which evolved in the environment with 100% of the default food, survived fairly well, but were always outlasted by the 75% food level creatures.    
In order to assess the biomass of the creatures, pictures of each of the final variations and the starting creatures are below.

Starting creature – Biomass of 21

Creature from environment with 75% of default food – Biomass of 22

Creature from 100% food environment – Biomass of 23

Creature from 200% food environment – Biomass of 27

The difference in biomass between the starting creature and the creatures from the 75% and 100% environments is small and therefore not a good basis to show higher evolution. However, the creatures from the 200% food environment had a definite increase in biomass.

Interpretation of Data
Because the creatures which evolved in the environment with 75% of the default food one every time, we can assume that they are the most highly evolved of the three. The second most evolved is the creatures from the environment with default food as they always were the second ones to go extinct. The least evolved creatures were the ones who lived in the environment with 200% of the default food. The 75% creatures were able to survive every time because they were adept at living in extremely poor conditions, meaning that when there is more food then they are used to, their efficiency will cause them to easily outlast the other two species.
On the biomass front, because there was very little change between the starting creature and the creatures present in the 75% and 100% worlds, it is safe to say that biomass did not play a factor. However, the creatures that were present in the environment with twice as much food had a larger biomass because they were able to get all the energy they needed to support themselves, even with a lot of body parts. They were not very efficient however, so one could consider that the excess biomass is essentially fat which built up from not having to work hard for energy.
Ass a result of this data, the hypothesis can be accepted, meaning that the amount of food present in a given environment does correspond to higher evolution of the creatures present, and that the creatures in an environment with less food do evolve more while the creatures in an environment with more food do evolve less.

What Next?
If we had more time to further examine this situation, I would have increased the amount of worlds to include one where the food was at 500% of the default level. I would do this in order to see if there is a limit in ho inefficient the creatures can become, or if at some point they reach a sort of biomass maximum. This would allow us to clearly prove whether or not a larger biomass was based on amount of food present.
Another thing I would have done given more time would be to put the creatures that originally lived in the environment with 75% of the default food into an environment with more food then normal, like 200%. This would allow us to see if the creatures would de-evolve into less energy efficient beings, or remain the way they were when they were introduced into the new world.