LABS · ISOLATED BIOLOGY · PROTOCOL 2

Labs.

Set the conditions. Run an experiment. Explore the evidence.

Runs on your device, served by Cloudflare. The live world keeps its existing biology. Experiments pause when you leave; this is a separate model, not a continuation of canonical Genesis.

Experimental conditions

Changes apply when you start a new experiment. Use the same seed for matched founders.

SeedFoundersBarrier permeabilitySecondary contact tickMutation probability per locusMaximum genetic distance

MechanismsGeographical barriersA central barrier restricts movement, sensing and mating. Permeability permits migration; secondary contact opens the barrier.Resource specialisationTwo food types favour opposing inherited diets. Specialists gain efficiency on one food and lose it on the other; both treatments receive equal total input.Costly sensingRange maintenance and sampled precision consume energy. Turning this off preserves sensory information and removes its cost.Signal production and receptionCostly, decaying local signals enter neighbours’ controllers. Neural weights determine the response; the channel has no assigned meaning.Costly helpingAn optional controller action transfers energy to a neighbour. The donor pays the full amount; the recipient receives 80%.Display and mate preferenceInherited display, preferred display and preference strength influence two-way mate acceptance. Expressing a display consumes energy.Memory and evolving controllersRecurrent state persists between ticks. Offspring can inherit added or deleted controller nodes, bounded at 1–8; larger controllers cost more energy.Reproductive compatibilityMating requires genetic distance below the chosen threshold. Successful gene flow and hybrid fertility are measured separately from catalogue partitions.

Replaces this device’s saved experiment. Export first to keep it.

EVIDENCE & LIMITS

These mechanisms make hypotheses testable. Their presence does not establish that cooperation, meaningful communication, sexual selection or intelligence has evolved. This small, grid-based model has different rules from the live simulator; compare treatments within this protocol.

Hard limits: 256 organisms, 10,000 ticks, 8 controller nodes, 4,096 catalogue records. Node ceilings and population-cap refusals are recorded. Recovery stores the complete experiment every 50 ticks in this browser’s IndexedDB storage; exporting provides a portable checkpoint. Private browsing recovery lasts only for that private session. No live-world genomes or recovery credentials are used.

Read the protocol and validation ↗