Many people seem to agree that there shouldn’t be investment points or skill points that force the species to develop in a certain way. Mutation points only exist to slow down evolution across time, and it doesn’t prevent the coexistance of certain features, but that can still be unlikely because of the very long timescales that would be required to design such species or the uncompetitiveness of that design in that physics engine.
Only the environment should determine which linear or branching development paths cells can realistically undertake. Cells should be free to try paths that wouldn’t work and fail because of that. There is always in some sense premade parts in cell stage because we just place the organelles instead of designing them by using proteins or whatever, so even if there was internal development of these organelles, in order to keep it simple, it would probably be a linear upgrade system like “mitochondria level 1 => mitochondria level 2”. But if we look at a cell overall, all the organelles can influence each other so the overall design of the cell has a more sandbox freedom and it can specialise in many ways. For example, a cell can add a pilus and slime jet and minimise all the other organelles to get lighter[1] so that it can engage with other cells when there is an oppurtunity and flee when there is trouble, or it can add many organelles and try to be the last one standing when a combat takes place.
We shouldn’t ask the question of “how do we prevent the cells from adding 30 mitochondrias and increasing their stats”. There should be no hard rule preventing them from adding as many organelles as they want if that helps them survive. But it shouldn’t help them survive. The environment should determine how many organelles is ideal to have. Every added organelle should have some pros and cons and designing the cell should be an optimisation problem.
It was mentioned that there was a problem with organelle gluttony. In the past at least. Imagine we have 2 species.
Species A => has 2 mitochondria
Species B => has 4 mitochondria
It may seem like species B is 2 times better. It generates 2 times more energy.
But now compare 2 A’s with a B. Which side is better? Certainly, cells can travel in packs. An example of this is multicellularity.
The total biomass of a species is determined by the total energy available to it through sunlight or the replenishment of hydrothermal vent chemicals. If the members of the species gets larger, it means that their population would get lower. So we shouldn’t ask “why is that species getting larger”, we should ask “why are those organelles getting divided into fewer membranes”.
If cells on the game are gluttonous about internal organelles, it means that the game isn’t considering the contributions of nuclei and membranes. In real life, cells don’t grow forever, they replicate because they start to have insufficient cell membrane when compared to the other organelles because of the square cube law. They start to not be able to do enough diffusion with the outside environment. Multicellular species solve this by having a circulatory system.
But this raises the question of how cells became multicellular in the first place, as a bunch of cells sticked together don’t have circulation either. There should be an overlap between the largest cell sizes and the smallest colonies. Because of this, I think the most likely cause for multicellularisation is a cell dividing like a zygote but the daughter cells failing to seperate from each other, and then inventing circulation in order to survive in that state. Why should unrelated cells even try to stick to each other and grow to those uncomfortable sizes?
And sometimes, individual cells can have circulation too, for example slime mold cytoplasm moves back and forth as if a heart is pumping.
if organelles have a weight ↩︎