The concept of baggage, in regard to an evolutionary change in energy source, can be summed up by considering the stages of progress that a structure would need to under- go in order to arrive at a state in which more energy is produced than is required for the structure itself. Can it be successfully argued that an accumulation of baggage might not require any energy to maintain it during the time that it is evolving into a structure that will eventually be at least self-sustaining? Surely there must come a time when the uncompleted structure will require some of organism’s resources. There’s also some slight hindrance to normal cellular activity because of the developing structure. However miniscule these things may be, there must be some slight decrease in the population of a group that has more baggage than the organisms that are extremely similar except in their lack of baggage.
Definition of Saturation
An important consideration is what happens in this ocean environment when the population reaches a saturation level. Once the density reaches a certain level, the death rate will equal the reproductive rate. The time it takes for an average organism of a saturated population to either reproduce by dividing or to die we’ll term the “saturation cycle”. Thus the probability of an average organism reproducing within a saturation cycle time is 50%. (“Average” refers to immediate survivability.) By definition, a saturated environment means that when we take a sample of a certain number of average organisms, after a period of time, the number of resulting organ- isms that are descended from that sample is predicted to be the same number as the original sample.
The fact that individual organisms die and reproduce at different rates, depending on various negative and positive circumstances, does not detract from the fact that a particular type of organism has an average saturation cycle.
Although a real-world scenario is more complex than a simulation, in that various boundaries and irregularities in environments may help or hinder different sub- groups of a population, the principle is the same: If a group of organisms is not at a saturation level, it will increase in population until it reaches saturation. Once at saturation level, only those organisms that have some advantage in immediate survivability will be predicted to increase in numbers relative to the immediate competition. Should a sub-group of a population be established in a more-or-less isolated environment, that group will increase to a saturated level with the laws of probability and survival of the fittest operating within that new environment both prior to saturation and after saturation is reached.
It might be argued that prior to saturation, differentiation might produce a unique sub-population and that this might produce a change that would increase the likelihood of the development of a new biological structure. On closer examin- ation, however, two things make saturated-environment simulations more appropriate:
1) By definition, a pre-saturated population is less numerous than a saturated population in an environment and so will be less likely to produce an an- cestor of the target organism. Should the simulations of this paper show it very unlikely that the original question can be answered in the affirma- tive, pre-saturation scenarios make little difference. (Should these simu- lations be less conclusive, however, then pre-saturation simulations may be worthy of consideration.)
2) The principles of survival of the fittest and baggage remain the same in the pre-saturated environment as in the saturated environment. Although pre-saturated competition can result in less-fit organisms increasing in numbers until saturation is reached, the limiting factor is that the more-fit organisms will be increasing faster than the less-fit.
Thus it seems that simulations of a biologically saturated environment are quite suitable for testing the concept of an evolutionary boundary. |
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