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We cover the Eocene epoch, including early horses that lived in forests, but didn’t climb trees. We also had early forms of bores, rhinos, whales and primates.
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Today, Phil and I get back to talking about the history of life and evolution, with the Paleocene epoch. During this time the birds spread out and diversify, along with the mammals. We talk about the early versions of the hooved animals and elephants, and a few other creatures. And I misspell champsosaurus. Hurray!
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Remember six? She’s a small population of the digital creatures I implemented, called “figures.” Six has a population size of 6, thus the name, and no matter how much room there is, no matter what the maximum population size happens to be, she always has a population size of 6 figures. Meanwhile, each figure will make one copy of itself and then die. There’s a constant stream of figures being born and copying themselves and dying, but the population size never changes/ it’s always 6.
I put six in a larger world. There was enough room for 200 figures. As expected, she still stayed at a 6 figure pop size. Then I started mutation.
Like I said in the last entry, the mutations are nasty, and often kill off an entire population. If that happened, six would be reloaded, back where she started before all this “mutation” business started going on, and do it all over again.
The notion was to see if six could evolve into a population that grows, instead of just holding steady. I set it up so it would beep at me when the population size reached 200, and pause the system so I could take a look at what six had become. I had no clue how long the experiment would run, or if six could be mutated into a growing population at all. I was all set to leave it running in the background while I did any&everything else.
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For once, there are no bugs to report, or fix. There are some utility methods I should add, and the perennial chore of updating the documentation. All that is all well and good, and I’ll get it done well… or good. However, since I can, I spent a few days just playing with the system and some of the populations that have been generated.
Let me introduce you to some of the populations.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:12 — 12.5MB) | Embed
Today we chat about the Cretaceous period, when some of the most well-known dinosaurs appear. In this period, birds became much more like modern birds. Flowering plants spread across the land, along with new insects like ants and bees. The mammals began to diversify. Then, a rock hit the earth, and it all came to an end.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:54 — 16.7MB) | Embed
Today we cover the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, growing large and being in charge. One group began, during this period, to evolve toward becoming birds, and we talk a little bit about some early mammals.
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In posts on this topic, I keep saying I’m about to get to the interesting part…
posts, with optimistic titles like “Trembling on the verge.” Followed immediately thereafter by posts like, “How long has that been wrong?”
Bugs and issues keep dancing out from between my lines of code, and they all demand their share of time and attention. It’s reached the point where I’ve become superstitious about it, so I didn’t say any sort of fate tempting phrase like, “Almost there,” or “nearly done,” in the last post.
BWAHAHAHAHA HA HAHA!
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:43 — 12.4MB) | Embed
We blame the sickness. Both of your hosts managed to catch, and were suffering from, a rather nasty little chest cold. In episode 179, on the Triassic period, we mispronounced, misspoke and mistook. Since we were recording on a holiday and didn’t want to do that much research for this week anyway, we corrected our mistakes from the last episode. While we were at it, we got to expand on a couple of things, and add a couple more.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:20 — 11.2MB) | Embed
Today, despite your hosts suffering from a nasty cold, we talk about the Triassic period. During this time, the first flying reptiles appear, along with several reptiles that returned to the water. We also get the very first dinosaurs, though they were still rather small, and the very first mammals, which were even smaller rodent-sized animals.
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During the Permian, the land vertebrates grew to large sizes, the ancestors of some families of coniferous trees began to dominate the forests, and some small reptiles learned to glide from tree to tree. At the end of the period, the most devastating mass extinction event in Earth’s history happened, wiping out most of the life on land and in the oceans, and setting the stage for the next period, and the rise of the dinosaurs.
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