Preview - From Ecosystems To Speciation

Exploring effects of energy cost on natural selection

In the previous experiment you must have observed that the phenotype with maximum number of flagella is not always successful in terms of its survival. This is because of the energy cost per flagellum. 

Let's investigate the effect of the energy cost per flagellum on the process of natural selection. 

Questions

Please answer the questions below.

Set ENERGY-COST-PER-FLAGELLUM to 0.10. Make sure that all the other parameters are at their original default values. Run the experiment till 5000 ticks. What is the average number of flagella in the population? 

What will happen if you increase the ENERGY-COST-PER-FLAGELLUM and run the experiment again? Explain your answer.

Design a series of computational experiments to systematically investigate the effect of ENERGY-COST-PER-FLAGELLUM on the process of natural selection. Describe your dependent variable and your independent variable. 

Notes

These notes will appear on every page in this lesson so feel free to put anything here you'd like to keep track of.