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Fossils in fossil fuel Around the same time that the ancestors of humans branched from the apes, organic sediments were being laid down that would eventually turn into oil. Some of this oil worked its way along fault lines, and began seeping out of the ground at the surface. Located in L.A. these tar pits …
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Shadows in the stone The Burgess Shale is a deposited of shale that was formed from large underwater avalanches that berried organisms around a half-billion years ago, preserving the soft parts of the bodies. However, the fossils have been squeezed down to a thin layer of carbon, leaving shadows of what the creatures once were. …
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Learning the most from the least Not all fossils are large bones of things like dinosaurs or mammoths. Some of them are small enough to require a microscope in order to identify them. Called microfossils, these tiny fragments, and even remains of single-celled organisms, can tell us a good deal about things like the climate, …
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Digging up the past When I was a child, my family visit a dig site. They were excavating fossils of mammoths. Before we get back to examining natural history, we’ll spend a few episodes finding out where the evidence for the story comes from. Here is a link to the hot springs mammoth site. Mammoth …
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Trees eyes and antlers Sometimes, very different organisms can end up having traits in common, even though they didn’t share those traits with an ancestor. Instead, different systems, solving similar problems, can come up with similar answers. Here’s a link to the episode on eyes. Ep 78: Eyes Here’s a link to an article about …
In episode 144, I oh so casually mentioned that I was getting some runtime errors. They don’t happen in every run, but the fact that they happen at all is a problem. My artificial life system will eventually be running for days at a time as I do different experiments, and I can’t have these …
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Does a long life really inhibit evolution? In episode 139 and 142, I talked about some results I’ve been getting with my experiment with artificial life and digital organisms. I had to rework the death object to make sure that one of the little critters would die and make room for others. But does an …
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Emergent self-replicating software from my experiments In the previous episode, I provided a description of “Amoeba.” In this episode I use “Figures,” which is my own experiment with digital organisms and artificial life, to repeat the results of Andy Pargellis’s Amoeba experiment, with a few differences. I also give the most detailed explanation of my …
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Emergent self-replication with Amoeba Did life come from chaos? If it did, could you get artificial life to do the same thing? As I’m repeating the experiment, with some difference, I thought I’d talk about Amoeba—an artificial life simulation that caused self-replicating bits of software to emerge from randomly generated code. I provide a general …
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A closer look at results from ep 139 In episode 139, I talked about unexpected results from my experiment with artificial life and digital organisms. There was a tiny bit of evolution happening with a very tiny population. Today, we take a closer look at what the system was doing. Here are links to previous …