Bobak Seddighzadeh Week 2

Methods and Results

1. Click on the Red organism in the Greenhouse to select it; its border will turn green. While

holding the shift key, click on the White organism in the Greenhouse to select for both

1. Click the Load button in the Controls. The World will fill with a roughly 50:50 mix of red

and white organisms. Specifically, I observed 51 red organisms and 49 white organisms

1. Set the Fitness settings in the Settings panel to select for red. Set the fitness of red to 10

(the maximum) and all the other colors to 0 (the minimum).

1. Prediction: I predict that within the first generation most the flowers will be red because they have the selective advantage with respect to their fitness. Also, within several generations I predict there should be no white flowers and all red flowers left because no new mutations are being introduced.
2. Test: Click the One Generation Only button in the Controls. This will run one generation

only. First, the starting flowers will contribute to the gene pool based on their fitnesses. Then the starting flowers will die off and be replaced by exactly 100 offspringflower will get two alleles randomly chosen from the gene pool.

1. Result: Within the first generation the ratio went from 51:49 to 70:30 red to white, which is 19% increase in the total amount of red flowers. After a subsequent generation, the ratio went to 90:10 red to white, which is another 20% increase in red flowers.

generations? At this rate of increase, I predicted that after three generations there should be no more white flowers left. However, it took three more generations leaving me with a total of five generations to achieve all red flowers. It took my partner nine generations to achieve the same results. I loaded a subsequent generation after I got all red flowers, and I observed one white flower. This is due to the fact that a portion of the flowers are heterozygotes meaning that the alleles for a white flower still exist in the gene pool.