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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Crossover Technologies |
| Publisher | |
| Designer | Greg Costikyan |
| Platform | Windows |
| Release |
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| Genres | Educational Life simulation Real-time strategy |
| Modes | Single-player Multiplayer (1-6) |
Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life is a life simulation and real-time strategy computer game that allows players to experience, guide, and control evolution from an isometric view on either historical earth or on randomly generated worlds while racing against computer opponents to reach the top of the evolution chain, and gradually evolving the player's animals to reach the "grand goal of intelligent life". It was published by Interplay Entertainment and Discovery Channel Multimedia in 1997.
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Players select different ages to play through, including the Labyrinthodontia, or the first amphibians through to the evolution of the Age of Mammals. Each species has points that players can spend on adapting or evolving their creature populations, which are represented by animated icons of that creature. The more points a player spends on a field for a species, the quicker it evolves, becomes better at feeding (and growing in number faster), or better at fighting off predators. When a player evolves a creature, one can pick a population to be upgraded to the evolution one chooses. Each creature has a different set of evolution paths, and some can evolve into six or more different creatures. The world grows as the game advances, with land masses drifting and terrain shifting. As the player evolves the selected creatures, the player slowly advances in the complexity of the animals, eventually reaching intelligent life. Usually, the first player to do this is the victor (standard rules).
The game starts from basal tetrapods, the very first land dwellers: amphibians. At the gain of the game, each player starts with one population of a species of prehistoric amphibian—e.g. Ichthyostega, Tulerpeton, and Acanthostega. Gradually, if the player monitors the species' progress and moves them to more appropriate habitats and climate zones, the selected species will feed, breed, and prosper. From that secure population who can then evolve more advanced and adaptable creatures, along with continental drift and climate change, the other, older, and more primitive species will be rendered obsolete, and their creatures will die out.
As the player advances their creatures, extinctions may wipe out populations of some species, while others may not be affected at all. Each species has a drop-down menu, which displays all the more advanced creatures that this particular species can evolve into. Eventually, when the player reaches intelligent and advanced animals, the menu will display certain creatures that can then evolve into the standard intelligent life of civilization builders. The line of intelligent species doesn't have to be humans (e.g. Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo sapiens). The player can also evolve other intelligent species who are fictional or highly speculative. For example, if a player evolves one of the creatures into an elephant, one can access the elephant line, and gradually evolve that elephant into Elephasapiens which is a species of intelligent life, thus winning the game. Elephasapiens of course, is fictional and speculative. Other species of intelligent life within the game are parrot men, wombat men, and dino men.
Once a player evolves intelligent life, the game ends and scores are added up and displayed, although the player who evolved intelligent life is guaranteed victory. Score points are given to players who make evolutionary breakthroughs. For example, evolving the first reptile, mammal, or dinosaur is worth bonus points.
The game can either be played alone or against the computer. With opponents, the game has another side to it. Each animal has the ability to evolve defense, and other animals (predatory creatures) controlled by the players, can fight each other's creatures, thus wiping out an enemy population, reducing competition and weakening the opponent. To fend off these attacks, the other player can, as said earlier, evolve defenses against the opponent's predators.
| Publication | Score |
|---|---|
| Computer Games Strategy Plus | 4/5[1] |
| Computer Gaming World | 1.5/5[2] |
Inside Games thought it was an "excellent simulation", and that it was "one of those rare edutainment titles that succeeds as entertainment, too".[3]
Electric Play felt the game was both "educational" and "interesting", giving the game an overall review score of 80%.[4]
Happy Puppy thought the game had much replay value, and gave the game an overall positive review.[5]
Pyramid stated that "Evolution shares the Discovery success strategy for straddling the road between education and entertainment. It's fun, and I actually learned something."[6]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life is a life simulation and real-time strategy computer game that allows players to experience, guide, and control evolution from an isometric view on either historical earth or on randomly generated worlds while racing against computer opponents to reach the top of the evolution chain, and gradually evolving the player's animals to reach the "grand goal of intelligent life". It was published by Interplay Entertainment and Discovery Channel Multimedia in 1997.
The tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, conceptual model, and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, as described in a famous passage in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. Tree diagrams originated in the medieval era to represent genealogical relationships. Phylogenetic tree diagrams in the evolutionary sense date back to the mid-nineteenth century. The term phylogeny for the evolutionary relationships of species through time was coined by Ernst Haeckel, who went further than Darwin in proposing phylogenic histories of life. In contemporary usage, tree of life refers to the compilation of comprehensive phylogenetic databases rooted at the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth. Two public databases for the tree of life are TimeTree, for phylogeny and divergence times, and the Open Tree of Life, for phylogeny.
The atmosphere of Earth consists of a layer of mixed gas (commonly referred to as air) that is retained by gravity, surrounding the Earth's surface. It contains variable quantities of suspended aerosols and particulates that create weather features such as clouds and hazes. The atmosphere serves as a protective buffer between the Earth's surface and outer space. It shields the surface from most meteoroids and ultraviolet solar radiation, reduces diurnal temperature variation – the temperature extremes between day and night – and keeps it warm through heat retention via the greenhouse effect. The atmosphere redistributes heat and moisture among different regions via air currents, and provides the chemical and climate conditions that allow life to exist and evolve on Earth. By mole fraction (i.e., by quantity of molecules), dry air contains 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other trace gases (see Composition below for more detail). Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1% at sea level, and 0.4% over the entire atmosphere. Earth's primordial atmosphere consisted of gases accreted from the solar nebula, but the composition changed significantly over time, affected by many factors such as volcanism, outgassing, impact events, weathering and the evolution of life (particularly the photoautotrophs). In the present day, human activity has contributed to atmospheric changes, such as climate change (mainly through deforestation and fossil-fuel–related global warming), ozone depletion and acid deposition. The atmosphere has a mass of about 5.15×1018 kg, three-quarters of which is within about 11 km (6.8 mi; 36,000 ft) of the surface. The atmosphere becomes thinner with increasing altitude, with no definite boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. The Kármán line at 100 km (62 mi) is often used as a conventional definition of the edge of space. Several layers can be distinguished in the atmosphere based on characteristics such as temperature and composition, namely the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere (formally the ionosphere), and exosphere. Air composition, temperature and atmospheric pressure vary with altitude. Air suitable for use in photosynthesis by terrestrial plants and respiration of terrestrial animals is found within the troposphere. The study of Earth's atmosphere and its processes is called atmospheric science (aerology), and includes multiple subfields, such as climatology and atmospheric physics. Early pioneers in the field include Léon Teisserenc de Bort and Richard Assmann. The study of the historic atmosphere is called paleoclimatology.
Speculative evolution is a subgenre of science fiction and an artistic movement focused on hypothetical scenarios in the evolution of life, and a significant form of fictional biology. It is also known as speculative biology and it is referred to as speculative zoology in regards to hypothetical animals. Works incorporating speculative evolution may have entirely conceptual species that evolve on a planet other than Earth, or they may be an alternate history focused on an alternate evolution of terrestrial life. Speculative evolution is often considered hard science fiction because of its strong connection to and basis in science, particularly biology. Speculative evolution is a long-standing trope within science fiction, often recognized as beginning as such with H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine, which featured several imaginary future creatures. Although small-scale speculative faunas were a hallmark of science fiction throughout the 20th century, ideas were only rarely well-developed, with some exceptions such as Stanley Weinbaum's Planetary series, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, a fictional rendition of Mars and its ecosystem published through novels from 1912 to 1948, and Amtor, a fictional rendition of Venus and its ecosystem published through novels from 1934 to 1964, and Gerolf Steiner's Rhinogradentia, a fictional order of mammals created in 1957. The modern speculative evolution movement is generally agreed to have begun with the publication of Dougal Dixon's 1981 book After Man, which explored a fully realized future Earth with a complete ecosystem of over a hundred hypothetical animals. The success of After Man spawned several "sequels" by Dixon, focusing on different alternate and future scenarios. Dixon's work, like most similar works that came after them, were created with real biological principles in mind and were aimed at exploring real life processes, such as evolution and climate change, through the use of fictional examples. Speculative evolution's possible use as an educational and scientific tool has been noted and discussed through the decades following the publication of After Man. Speculative evolution can be useful in exploring and showcasing patterns present in the present and in the past. By extrapolating past trends into the future, scientists can research and predict the most likely scenarios of how certain organisms and lineages could respond to ecological changes. In some cases, attributes and creatures first imagined within speculative evolution have since been discovered. A filter feeder radiodont was illustrated by artist John Meszaros in the 2013 book All Your Yesterdays by John Conway, C. M. Kosemen and Darren Naish. In the year following publication, a taxonomic study proved the existence of the filter feeding radiodont Tamisiocaris.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.