"Fluxe"

why bother?

Understanding Natural Selection

Darwin at Home invites you into the algorithm.

The kick that I got the first time that I witnessed one of these springy muscular bodies desperately racing to survive was something I immediately needed to share as widely as I could.

A subtle muscle coordination that was obviously far too difficult for me to engineer had spontaneously emerged from software that I had just written! All the books that I had read about evolution by natural selection were suddenly no longer just stories about what can happen during unimaginably expansive eons of time. I had in my hands a beautiful example of accelerated natural selection!

Things have moved on since then. Originally the only thing that evolved was the muscle coordination, and people had to first build the bodies by hand. Now shape is also an emergent property of the bodies, since I was able to add growth mutations. The thing to watch now is the interplay between the two kinds of mutations because they are not at all separate.

The idea is not that this research takes place within the walls of my private mad-scientist lab, but rather that anybody on the internet who is interested can play a part. The software is free, open source, and set up to automatically install on your computer if it is Java-enabled. You can watch your computer discover things!

This project can go a lot further in a number of directions, so if you write software you could inherit the work I've done so far and move forward. For example, it would be exciting if the bodies found themselves in an environment in which they had to compete for energy (muscle contractions) and matter (elastic intervals), and make relevant survival decisions. If you find yourself interested enough to want to discuss the future with us, please don't hesitate!

I think that if the workings of survival-of-the-fittest were more common knowledge we will have experienced a raising of consciousness about how the design in nature came about. People need to get a feel for how design by natural selection just happens, under the right conditions, even in a simple system of vectors that make up these running bodies .

- Gerald de Jong
   a.k.a. "Fluxe"
   Author of Darwin at Home.