Fig. 7.

Change in population-averaged metabolic proficiency in different conditions of environmental energy using alternate cellularity function. The population-averaged metabolic proficiency was measured alongside the series of simulations described in Fig. 6, wherein the level of cellular impermeability for each organism was determined by the number of cellularity genes using either a linear function, cellularity = 0.25n, shown in black, or a reverse of the original function, cellularity = 0.5ⁿ, shown in red. a Organisms began each simulation with 0 cellularity genes (i.e., 0% cellular impermeability in the linear function or 100% cellular impermeability in the reverse function) in an environment with unlimited food puzzles and processing energy. b Organisms began each simulation with 0 cellularity genes in an environment with unlimited food puzzles, but a limited number of energy parcels in the environment equivalent to 25% the maximum population capacity. c Organisms began each simulation with 3 cellularity genes (i.e., 75% cellular impermeability in the linear function or 12.5% cellular impermeability in the reverse function) in an environment with unlimited food puzzles and environmental energy. d Organisms began each simulation with 3 cellularity genes in an environment with unlimited food puzzles, but a limited number of energy parcels in the environment equivalent to 25% the maximum population capacity. These results demonstrate that after substituting very different functions for determining cellular impermeability values, the evolution of metabolism behaves the same as previously observed in simulations using the original cellularity formula (Fig. 4)