The Pros And Cons Of Natural Selection

Natural selection is a theory suggesting that some genetic traits will be more common than another trait in a given environment in which the organisms live in. Natural selection is a slow and gradual process which will happen in the matter of generations of the species. The traits become less or more common depending on the environmental circumstances, in other words, selection pressure.

If for example the selection pressure is the availability of food, the animals which can get to the food faster with their strong muscles will have their traits be more common than the animals which have weaker muscles. This is because the food allows the animals with stronger muscles to survive, which in turn makes not much food surplus available for the weaker muscled animals to survive. Hence making the stronger trait more common than the less stronger trait.

The simulator does something similar to this. The organisms in the beginning are identical. They have arms of a similar length as a result of their phenotypes. To simulate nature, every cycle we could say represents a generation. Every generation we see new organisms born with random mutations. Based on the environment we see different mutations on the newborn. For example, if its environment through the generations allowed its ancestors to survive, based on the phenotypes we saw in the ancestors we can see them again in the newborn. Basically saying that the parents of the newborn lived long enough to mate with the same traits., in turn giving the newborn those same exact traits. In this case, it is traits which code for arms length.

This is because the theory suggested that the traits would be more common through generations if the environment did not make it less common. In other w...

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...cycle. So, anything < C 160.

Orange line is quite strong, you kill more short armed species than long armed species. You can see that this result matches the graph. The orange line stays above the red and blue line until C 160.
Green line is the strongest, you kill all short armed species. You can observe this on the graph because of the dramatic increase in the beginning until cycle 50. The line then notably stays right above all the lines until C 160.

So why do we get irregular results at C 160?
There could be two reasons.
1. We get these irregular results due to the availability of food. When many long arms grab the food, there will be less food left for the other long armed creatures.

2. We get these irregular results because of the fact this program doesn’t take into account all factors which give us selection strength. Giving us irregular activity at C160.