The Selfish Pixie.

"Once upon a time there was a junkyard: every type of flotsom and jetsom, thingammyjig and gee-gaw piled teeteringly high on all sides. Open to the elements it was lashed by wind, drowned by rain and lit by lightning. Sometimes completely by accident, something would fall exactly here, and something else would fall exactly there, and a pixie would be born.

Most times the pixie would stagger about and fall to pieces - but one day, a special pixie came into being... Let's call him Danny. Danny was different, when he stood up and looked around, he felt lonely, so he started to make another pixie, just like him. Then another, and another. Then the other pixie started making a copy of himself and that copy made a few more too. It started to get crowded.

One afternoon it was very stormy; lightning began to flash in the sky, approaching fast. One pixie on the top of a junkpile looked up. At that moment a great bolt of electricity struck him on the nose. This random accident scrambled his brains. When he made the next pixie, that pixie was different. This pixie, instead of imediately making a copy of himself, waited awhile, and made himself a little yellow hard-hat. Because he waited, he wasn't quite as fast as the others at copying himself, so they always vastly outnumbered him and his little hard-hatted friends. "Ooh - look at their stupid hats..!" the bare-headed would say, and titter into their little pointy beards.

But one day, their was a terrible hailstorm, with chunks of ice the size of apples whizzing down from the sky like minature meteorites. Within an hour, all the bare-headed pixies lay dead, their poor little heads squished flat. The hard-hat pixies danced and capered with glee "Hah-hah..!" they chanted, and shook their little fingers at their fallen brothers."

Extracts from Tabula's Notebook 1:

It is important to remember that a replicator is a chemical sequence that has only one fundamental trait: to copy itself. It knows, and can know... Absolutely nothing. Imagine a thousand paper boats floating on a river as it winds its way from the mountains to the sea, around rocks, over falls, across rapids. The boat that reached the sea first - if we had had a camera following it, and viewed the playback - we would see that the 'winning' boat, at each and every twist and turn and danger on its journey would seem to have made the 'right' decision, the 'intelligent' decision. But is still just a piece of paper. Replicators achieve what seems like 'minded' choice in hindsight, through simple brute numbers. Any one individual knows nothing. As long as 'winning' was possible - One of the boats was always bound to win. To win the race, all that needed to be done, was to build enough boats, enough designs.

So - Any DNA pixie does not know a 'good' change from a 'bad' change. The qualities of good and bad are imposed only in hindsight, after an enviromental change contextualizes it as such. DNA is not alive, it is only an illusion at the point where natural laws and chemical properties co-incide over time that makes it seem to 'change' in an 'intelligent' fashion. What looks like reaction to changes in the enviroment, is really not reaction at all. It is a serrendipitous pre-emption. The 'invention' always comes before external forces make it suddenly a necessity.

Say we had driven our car past the junkyard a few years ago - we'd have seen only bareheaded pixies, and maybe one or two of the mutant strain. We'd have thought 'Hmm - the bareheaded ones are the most successful..." Why..? - because, like the pixies, we had no way of knowing what was coming.

This 'not knowing' is the major stumbling block for our DNA pixies. Any Pixie that could develop a way to predict the future would instantly become the most successful pixie on the planet. The ability of prediciton is the holy-grail for DNA, though of course, they can't know that.

One way to bullet-proof against an uncertain future is to find ways of being able to pre-empt many many different 'possible' enviromental changes - latant adaptability. How do you enable adaptability..? By encouraging mutation. How do you encourage mutation..? By having a DNA code that is very suceptable to interferrence from external mutagens - hard radiation, sunlight, heavy isotopes, free-radicals etc. This method however has its penalties:

"Over the years in the junkyard, a new type of pixie emerged. The nudist. The nudist pixies wore no clothes except their hardhats and had pale, almost transparent skins. They also liked sunbathing. They stayed out in the sun so long that it often cooked their little brains right out of their skulls. They made copies as fast as the others, but those copies were sometimes wholly bizzare, and died very quickly. Some were pretty bizzare, but still worked - long wriggly arms, rubber wellies, raincoats, aqualungs, you name it, they built it, and kept, from the traditional Hard-hatters' point of view, wasting their energy in doing so.

The normal Hard-hatters were bemused. They went on making faithful copies of themselves, which almost always always worked, and multiplied at a rate massively outpacing the nudists. The odd shower of killer-hailstones was weathered easily, and things continued for a long-long time. Still, the nudists always hung on in there, as a minority. 'If nothing else', thought the hard-hatters, 'they provide a little colour'.

Then some things happened very quickly: After a particularly cold spell, all the old car-batteries in the junkyard froze. Then there was a red-hot heatwave. The Car-batteries cracked, and burst, releasing a flood of nasty acid. Almost all the Hard-hatters died, their little legs burned off at the knee. But the nudists, quite a lot of which had luckily made little wellies, survived. (Some of the Hardhatters, who'd been struck by lightning, had also made wellies by accident - even though their friends had laughed, they survived too.)

Soon later came a monsoon. It rained and rained and rained. The remaining Hardhatters, despite their accidental wellies, soon got waterlogged and rusty and stopped working. The nudists however, also had a group who'd invented raincoats, as well as wellies, and they kept on trucking through the downpoar. It rained so much, that soon the whole junkyard was underwater. But that was okay too - because some of the nudists pixies - the particularly crazy ones - had also made little aqualungs which let them breath, and long wiggly arms that they found were excellent for swimming."

Extract from Tabula's Notebook 2:

Maximizing latent adaptation in readiness for an unknown future with plain mitotic division (cloning) is wasteful, because for one 'useful' mutation, a zillion crappy and sometimes lethal mutations are also produced. This is because the nudist pixies' DNA - being necessarily 'wide open' comparitively to random strikes by mutagens - 99.99999 percent of the time produces unbeneficial effects, at least - unbeneficial at that point in time. This strategy is simply a 'try everything and hope something works.' Imagine studying for the most important exam of your life - but unfortunately, you have no clue as to what the subject will be. You have a choice -

1) Study one subject to its current limits, and pray it comes up. If it does - you hit the jackpot - and become outright leader of the world. If it doesn't, you die.
2) Skim absolutely everything from knitting to particle physics. Whatever comes up, you'll get a point or two, become a toilet-cleaner, but survive.

Now - the 'unknown exam' analogy is good to a point - and logically produces the two strategems I've mentioned. But... Enviromental change isn't like that. If it was a one off exam - with a myriad possibilities of subject, anyone with half a brain would choose option two, and survive. But enviromental change is more a constant set of exams repeated periodically, and as such - the pixies can look at the 'past papers', guess what the subject will be next year, and prepare accordantly.

Then their choice becomes:

1) Traditional - Study last year's topic to its current limits. (esp. if that same subject has come up every year for the last millenia.)
2) Eccentric - Skim everything.
3) Totally insane - Study a completely different topic from last year's to its current limits.

Actually - this is a lie, our pixies cannot yet 'see' the past just as they cannot 'see' the future - but this doesn't matter - just as the paper boat floating down the stream sticks to certain paths dictated by the currents of the water - which in turn obey the forces of gravity, and the lie of the land, so the pixies naturally fall into a set of unknowing and unchosen stategies, dictated by the medium in which they exist... Noticable only over a (verrry-long) period of time by an external observer.


"Covered in water, the pixies went on with the basics: picking up junk, and making copies. For a long-long time every new day was like the last. Because the water shielded them from the hailstones, the hardhats that had been so necessary became not so. So when some of the pixies got their brains fried and stopped making them, they didn't die. And because they saved the time they would have spent making them, and just copied themselves quicker instead - they slowly became the most numerous group. Simularly, the acid-proof wellington boots became less common, as they hampered swimming. And very very slowly, the pixies with the most flippery feet became the norm.

As time went by, and still nothing changed much, the aqua-pixies fell into three groups. The ones who didn't get their brains fried now did best, because they were already pretty well suited to the watery junkyard where they lived, and the copies they made all worked perfectly well without the need for any extras. One day, one of these traditional pixies went for a bask in the sun. 'A little bit won't hurt' he said to himself. But of course - Pow - he got his brain fried. But luckily - the next copy he made was still exactly like him, except for one small difference... It was wearing some real cool sunglasses.

Shades-Pixie was very successful, because the smoked-glass protected him from the nasty hot sunshine, so he hardly ever got his brain fried, and almost every copy he made worked just fine. Suddenly, nearly everybody in the junkyard had sunglasses.

There still remained a smaller number of unshaded-pixies who made mistakes in copying more often and sometimes gave themselves an extra bellybutton by accident, or grew a teapot on their heads - but since these modifications didn't actually mess with their swimming and copying abilities too much - they stayed around, on the fringes, trying to get everyone to believe cranial-teapots were the next big thing.

Of course, every group has its whackos - a tiny group that had had their brains fried once too often and made copies that wasted huge amounts of time and energy building themselves totally useless extras - arms so long they frequently tied themselves in knots - huge titanium hard hats that made them sink under the weight - colourful beach umbrellas the size of football pitches. Most of them died pretty sharpish, but some always seemed to hang on, dragging around whatever crazy extra that had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Time trickled by - each new dawn bringing the same amount of sunshine, the same boring old water, the same great heaps of junk lying around, just waiting for anyone to come along and pick it up - and so the Shades-pixies, the Teapot-heads and the Total-Loonies, even though they swapped groups sometimes, remained in roughly the same ratio to eachother. The total pixie population grew and grew and grew. Peaceful, happy pixies.

Then the junk ran out. And times got... Hard."

Extracts fromTabula's Notebook 3:

If you study any population of bacteria you will find a rough mixture of these three basics types:

A huge population of traditionalist types - very well suited to the enviroment they are in, and multiplying efficiently, perhaps with some means of protecting their DNA from mutagenic influence. These are the ones who have decided that next year's enviromental exam will be exactly the same as last year's. If they change at all, it will be toward a greater specialization in their 'favourite subject'. These types are the backbone of any colony, the ones that spread, carrying the others with them.

A smaller proportion of eccentric types - still well suited to their enviroment, but with additions that are not really necessary to the habitat in question. These guys are the middle management - still hedging their bets against a future change of subject. This group is actually the worst to be in. Remember the "Duck" - not the quack-quack version, but the amphibious vehicle version, prior to the hovercraft. It could travel like an armoured car on land, and like a boat on water. But it had a serious flaw: It was crap. It wallowed like a pig in the river, and drank petrol like there was no tomorrow on land, it was slow and hard to manoever in both elements. Out-competed by racecar and speedboat, the lesson of the Duck - specialize. Be good at one thing or the other. Don't consciously try to be so-so at both. While studying a number of subjects may seem less risky than only one, it really isn't, because unless the subjects they've studied all come up on the exam (a lower chance in combination than the one) they will either be outcompeted by the specialists if the same subject comes up again - Or quickly become outnumbered by the lucky loony who specialized in one of the new subjects that came up, if last years didn't and all the traditionalists died.

A tiny proportion of the totally insane. Mutagens strike regardless, and bad-luck (or good luck from another point of view) will always ensure that there is a small turnover of borderline-none-functional misfits that are 'ready' for any particular new exam subject that may come along in the future. Well, nearly any new exam subject anyway.

No system is ever stable, at least not for very long. Even if the enviroment at large does not change, and whatever life there is a so well adapted to that eviroment it becomes abundant - this very abundance in an arena of finite resource, forces change. We must remember that almost everyone and everything, is from a genetic point of view, a species of one.Every group, however easy it is to think of them as a whole, is a just a mass of competing individuals. And each individual, does not really give a monkies about the genes of the rest. It's "me me me", not "we we we", when push comes to shove, at least at the level our little friends are at currently.

The Pixies Go To War.

"When the going gets tough, the tough are all that remain:

For a while, the pixies just stared around at the big empty places where all their lovely junk had been. One of them got so distraught, he went completely to pieces. Literally. The junk he'd been made of sank slowly, swirling on unseen currents, to settle on the bottom with a forlorn little puff of dust. The pixies eyed eachother in a new light. You could almost hear the new thought rustling through their little noggins. "Really, really-really - there's just me here - All these other guys are just walking bits of junk... Hmmm."

You could have heard a pin drop.

Suddenly, every pixie that could freestyle, flail, jet, rotor or suction-pad, descended on the little pile. There was a pile-up. A bit of accidental pushing. A bit of friendly elbowing in retaliation. A few harsh words. Gloves were taken off. Sleeves were rolled up. A punch. A kick. Someone picked up a broken bottle. A chair. Only a complete lack of chandiliers prevented ariel combat.

War. War's good. War makes a lot of junk.

Those left standing surveyed the carnage, nodded distantly to eachother, and started collecting what they needed to build. They retired with their ill-gotten gains to their respective corners and got to work.

...Continued...