Environmental Hazard

Cells in the CA are born in the zygote and gradually stream backward. When reaching their graveyard they die. A death mechanism was illustrated in a previous chapter .Cells accumulate matter and when accumulation exceeds  a certain threshold they die. You may wonder why does matter accumulation kill a cell?  Actually the stored stuff is its product, which is utilized by other cells. (existing in other CAs). In order to release it the cell has to die and disintegrate. Death of one cell is the other one's gain . This rule controls food chains, and operates also in our body.

Final cause

The task of a CA, and the reason for its existence is to make a product which is utilized by other CAs. This is the Final Cause of its existence. . The age distribution at death may be regarded as a frequency distribution of CA's product. Previously each CA had its own , built in, death threshold. In reality the cause of cell death is external to the CA. It is driven by the environment (other CAs), whose demand for a CA product will set the death threshold of its cells. Which is illustrted below.

Each frame depicts two CAs. One marked by an E represents the environment. At any  instant, its state determines the death threshold of the other CA. The experiment started by planting two CA#600 zygotes. Initially both grew and differentiated. Then the E-CA started setting the death threshold of its brother. Some cells started dying creating empty spaced (vacuoles). These resulted from cells which died and released  their product into the environment.

The next frame depicts the effect of the same environment on a CA#2058.

In the frames below, one CA#2058 acted as environment,. The 'impact' printed  below the frames indicates the intensity of the effect of the environmental state, on the age threshold. All three environments traverse the same states. They differ by their impact on the death threshold. The impact in the first frame was relatively low. E-CA kept its neighbor as larva, which did not mature to produce nectar. Since environment covered the demand for nectar, there was no need for additional product and the CA became a non-nectar producing larva. In the next frame the impact was more pronounced, and in the third, the larva barely survived.

This experiment illustrates several biological features:
- A mechanism by which production in a unit assembly is regulated, or optimized.
- Modeling of organs during growth, like in an embryo. As it grows,  cell death, called apoptosis, shapes organ structure.
- It illustrates also the effect of unrestrained capitalism (E)  on the market (the other CA). Or the exploitation (E)  of the Amazonas. Both are regarded here as biological processes.

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