Overview

When individual single-celled organisms become increasingly dependent on each other over generations, they may eventually evolve to be obligately dependent on each other and thus a multicellular organism. Today we’ll be exploring how artificial life systems can capture that major transition.

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class you should be able to:

  • Define fraternal transition
  • Explain at a high level how DISHTINY enables the exploration of fraternal transitions

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

  • Recreate simple experiments using DISHTINY

Reading

You should read the following to achieve the basic learning objectives:

Checks

Answer the following questions on Moodle:

  • What dynamics of life are captured by the DISHTINY platform? What is still missing? (Or is it actually alive??)
  • While it seems obvious that there is a difference between single-cellular bacteria and multi-cellular animals, the transition point it a bit murkier. What evidence does the DISHTINY paper claim would indicate a multi-cellular organism emerged? Do you agree?