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Virtual Genetic Evolution

Posted by michael on Sun Aug 25, 2002 01:06 AM
from the still-vulnerable-to-dandruff-shampoo dept.
Science
Sleeperservice writes "This story at New Scientist describes how, using cell simulation in computers, evolution can be simulated. How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?"
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  • How long before we get virtual humans? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by strredwolf (532) on Sunday August 25 2002, @01:10AM (#4135633) Homepage Journal
    They're speeding up evolution via a cell simulator. How long will it be before we get true AI by teaching a virtual human that was just freshly evolved? :)
    • Can you speed up evolution? Can you simulate complex evolution with digital computers?

      I don't know. This is very simplified "evolution".

      Evolutionary systems tend to crap out and stop evolving quite quickly. I'd expect this one to do the same. To expect brains and intelligence to evolve is overly optimistic IMO, since nobody has accomplished that yet.

      The Santa Fe Institute (I believe) had a much more interesting ALife system where the little guys would live in a distributed ecosystem on various internetworked computers.

      It seems reasonable to me that you'd have to evolve an entire world/ecosystem, not just organisms.

      -Kevin

      • They discuss the last part of your comment in the article. What drives the "evolution" is the complexity of the task at hand. Whether its pushing a box or something else, they say that it is very very important to keep coming up with new tasks to push the limits of the little cyber-critters. I would think that without an enviroment that demands adaptation, evolution would occur either very slowly or not at all. I mean how far do you think we would of evolved if say everyone had food and didn't have to worry about predators? We'd probably evolve to the point where we die off at an acceptable rate in order not to cause overcrowding and hurt the species in the long term. Of course some rouge critter would probably develop a gene to live longer, so maybe you can't stop evolution anyway.

        Just in case someone says that evolution is "just gene mutation", I would disagree. I would say that evolution is "gene mutation" that benefits the entity that has mutated and made it better adapted to it's enviroment than say average-joe-critter.
  • I suppose when you get down to it we're all nothing more than electrical pulses running down organic "wires" anyway. That is, if you can ignore the support systems (cardio, and the like). It seems possible that this could be represented by the extremely logic nature of a computer.

    The problem is they're not really simulating life since they pre-program the genome anyway. They are, in effect, telling it how a "complex web of neurons" (aka. brain) should look and operate.

    The article claims they've created creatures with very primitive mobility and senses. Going from there to sentience, wants, needs, emotions, reproduction etc. will be very difficult to simulate in an environment where chaos does not exist.

    OTOH, sounds like they've found a really clever compression scheme.
      • Whether or not a box-pusher is simulating life is secondary to the immediate goal of liberating humans from the task of pushing boxes...

        (chuckle)

        If the economy does not improve soon, many of us will be doing just that. Perhaps we will then have a better appreciation for such "toy germs".
  • What if we are just a simulation running on some computer? I guess that's all just Through the Looking Glass again. "Are we the dreamer, or merely a part of another's dream?"

    BlackGriffen

    • Possibly - but pretty hard to prove it (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2002, @02:09AM (#4135751)
      The Simulation Argument [simulation-argument.com]

      Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
      Nick Bostrom (2002)
      Forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly.

      ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

      • Another bit of evidence (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Wouldn't future computers have precision limitations that would cause artifacts in the simulated world? Relativity and the passage of time, randomness of subatomic particles.

        Also, the authors of the universe would have to cheat from time to time to deal with the limitations of whatever hardware they're using. Not wanting to simulate an entire universe, they just crudely simulate distant worlds as point sources of information and place them far enough so the approximation will never be realized.

        Also, adjustments would be made from time to time as the simulation evolved. After all, such a universe would be a product of curiousity and it would be difficult to not want to tweak certain things and see how the system is affected.

        But then you get into the murky business of whether or not the simulators are simulated. If simulation=reality, it becomes illogical to continue pondering the question.
    • Like in Daniel F. Galouye's [t-online.de] Simulacron-3 [hermes-press.com]( aka Counterfeit World)? Basis for both 13th Floor and Welt am Draht / World on a Wire [imdb.com]. That book is from 1964.
  • The article reads like all they have done is code a bog standard Genetic Algorithm for moving boxes. Have I read the article wrong or have they discovered nothing new??
    • The article reads like all they have done is code a bog standard Genetic Algorithm for moving boxes. Have I read the article wrong or have they discovered nothing new?? You're right. It's simply an extension of the same artificial life and genetic algorithms that have been around for several years. It's useful research, but only because it's an interesting way of exploring a design space in the same way evolution does - massive trial and error, with conservation of those things that seem to work. The title led me to believe that they were actually simulating the real genes, proteins and other signals that go to building a body. Now that would be a breakthrough of monumental proportions - even if all they did was start with a slime mold. John Roth

  • DNA Mapping (Score:4, Informative)

    by metlin (258108) <narayan@f[ ]harvard.edu ['as.' in gap]> on Sunday August 25 2002, @01:53AM (#4135713) Homepage Journal
    I'd written an essay on something similar to this, of using DNA Mapping long ago when I'd just started doing AI. You can find the essay here [metlin.org].

    Ofcourse, once you start working on it, you just realise how damn tough it is, and although it sounds easy on paper, it's just not that simple. Simulated environments are just too complex.

    And it's also interesting that David Zindell has written some interesting stuff on this in his series Requiem for Homo Sapiens, on simulated /virtual humans/ and so on.

    • GIGO (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ben Jackson (30284) on Sunday August 25 2002, @04:38AM (#4135965) Homepage
      Simulated environments are just too complex.
      And genetic algorithms, knowing nothing of your problem domain, tend to find solutions that capitalize on facets of your environment that you hadn't even considered. Two examples from my experience:

      I had a population of simulated organisms competing in a shared 2d grid for food, which appeared in a pile at a random location when the old food was depleted. While the organism had basic looking/moving operations to rely on, invariably some would discover that with enough organisms, the food moves enough that you can survive by just looking around until the food is in your line of sight, and then jumping on it. My arbitrary decision to place the food randomly formed the basis for an *entire species* of organisms (which didn't fare too well when some got smarter).

      These same organisms used a stack to do their thinking. Looking and eating produced values, which could be used for simple branching. Out of sheer laziness, I designed the stack to allow infinite pops off an empty stack which would return false, and infinite pushes on a full stack which would discard the values. One memorable run produced a dominant species which relied on this stack behavior to implement COUNTING! It intentionally (well, purposefully) left crud on the stack in a main loop, relying on the filled-stack behavior to detect a certain number of iterations. The stacksize and the arena size happened to be comparable, and this is how it determined when to turn.

      • Re:GIGO (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wormbin (537051)

        I had a similar experience to this.

        I had a friend who believed in numerology: specifically that showing that if some numbers could be converted to other numbers via simple equations then that proved that these numbers had some kind of divine association and thus revealed something about the universe. I thought this was incorrect (kind words) and decided to write a program that would take any set of input numbers, a set of operators, plus a desired output number and then use a genetic algorithm to find the smallest equation to link the two. The individuals in the population were equations and they would behave similar to a biological population in that they would sexually reproduce, mutate, inferior equations are pruned, etc.

        The program could go through 1000 generations rather quickly and produced very small equations. I never found numbers that couldn't be related by a very small equation.

        One time the best equation looked something like the following (I forget the exact equation so this is just a non-real example):

        666*666*666+666*666+666=7

        The equation was obviously incorrect so I had no idea why it was chosen as the best equation. I then ran it through my evaluation function and it actually worked! It took a bit of head scratching but it turned out that my evaluation function was ignoring overflow and underflow in operations thus large values would eventually become negative. The genetic algorithm took advantage of this fact and produced equations that cleverly used overflow and underflow!

        I thought this was pretty cool but it also felt a little creepy.

  • How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?

    If you consider that we already have what is by far the world's largest Beowulf Cluster (tm) working on this problem -- every living organism in the world -- perhaps not so long.

    • A-38847, First cutaway 4-14-2002

      What jump number? Inquiring minds want to know. Also, what's your DZ?

      Blue skies!

      E
      B-34024, First cutaway 1.April.1995, jump #30

  • Karl Sims' work (Score:4, Interesting)

    by scratchor (31393) on Sunday August 25 2002, @02:23AM (#4135770) Homepage
    On the same subject, be sure to check out Karl Sims work. He did some research on the virtual evolution of 'blockie' creatures, using genetic algorithms. Check the link for some cool movies of swimming, hopping, following creatures. In a following paper, he lets the creatures compete in virtual tournaments, simulating natural selection as such. Movies of competing creatures are also available at the above link. For the paper check out the following link.

  • I have a dragon (Score:3, Funny)

    by austad (22163) on Sunday August 25 2002, @02:28AM (#4135783) Homepage
    I figure out the DNA sequence for a dragon long ago, and used and elephant to implant the engineered egg into. I wanted a nice cute little dragon, but damn, the thing is huge.

    I was planning on crossing the dragon DNA with a pig, to make it both smaller and smarter, but wouldn't you know, it won't work. Everyone's heard the song "You can't cross Dragon and Pig DNA". Apparently, you have to get the dragon drunk to make the pig look more attractive. [msnbc.com]

  • The sheer Arrogance of slashdot posters (Score:3, Insightful)

    by siewsk (603269) on Sunday August 25 2002, @02:47AM (#4135810)
    The sheer arrogance of the slashdot poster is unbelievable. Just listen to this:

    This story at New Scientist describes how, using cell simulation in computers, evolution can be simulated. How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?

    Come on! The simulation is about as closer to reality as the economist assumptions of the rational consumers. You don't know how many corners they can cut in their simulation. It's just a simulation and it is as good as the assumptions made by the people who created the simulation. Real life is messy and difficult to predict. It will be hundreds of years before they get the simulation even close to the true working of a real cell.
    • The simulation is about as closer to reality as the economist assumptions of the rational consumers.

      In other words, good enough for a Nobel Prize.

      Oh wait, that's why nobody takes the Nobel Prizes seriously -- because they give them to economists as well. :)

      But seriously folks... read Greg Egan's 'Permutation City' if you want to explore these sorts of ideas. I don't think this story is particularly groundbreaking news.
  • Even better, how long will it take to make a virtual geek woman?

    I want the specifications so I can sell them on slashdot for 50 mod points a pop.

  • First to answer the question in the post about dragons: This simulation is not going to lead to that without some sort of random addition of mutation to the system (which isn't described in the article). The "cell types" that are used by the program to create the "genomes" are only what we understand on a very low resolution level. We don't have any equal representation for "fire-breath" and we certainly wouldn't have any clue what the high-resolution DNA sequence/genetic expression profile for that cell-type would be even if it were included in the simulation as described.

    This simulation is on par (maybe a *little* more in-depth than) the GOLEM project [brandeis.edu] that's been running out of Brandeis for quite a while now (you can download your own evolution simulation). Basic blocks which when recombined with each other "develop" into more complex things that can be rated on their ability to function in a certain role and be recombined to hopefully produce something even more efficient.

    More impressive forced-evolution science is the DNA shuffling work of labs and companies like Maxygen [maxygen.com]. This is truly evolution in a tube and deals directly with the genetic sequence as opposed to higher-level vague cell-type simulations.

    But the great thing about science is that there's room enough in it for pretty much any research.

  • ...the chances of life evolving on non-Earth like planets? For example, could someone run a simulation to see if organisms could thrive on a planet all Earth life forms would perish on?

    I've always been interested in this, because if this is possible, it would seriously increase the chances of life being elsewhere, since the odds of an "Earth-like" planet are supposedly not that great.

    • Probably not, because nobody (but the Creatonists, of course ;-) knows how life got to be on this planet, let alone one which is totaly different to earth. Remember, all these simulations start with sustainable life existing; also most (if not all) don't cover macro-evolution.
    • What's also an interesting question to consider (not that this is at all close to it yet) us what is the chances of life evolving on earth, or on earth-like planets?

      For example, it may be true that the odds of life developing on earth are 1 in a billion, and it just happened to happen. OTOH, it could be close to 1. Knowing these probabilities could help us estimate the possibilities of there being other life in the universe. All we can say now is that the probability is more than 0, but who knows how much more?

  • Dr. Dan Ashlock at Iowa State University has been evolving robots that push blocks around a 2-D world for some time now. Check out the BotWorld link on his research page [iastate.edu] for info. On a side note, I did a research project for one of his courses during Spring 2002, where I evolved robots for Robocode [ibm.com] that were effective in destroying human-programmed robots.

  • Are Creationists going to build a God simulation in order to compete? :-)
  • Genetic algorithms are interesting and useful in some cases. But attempting to recreate evolution in a useful amount of time using these techniques.

    Let's see.... assume we start with single celled organisms in the ocean.

    We have 3 billion years - that.s 9x10^16 seconds.

    And how many organisms... well, assume the biological part of the ocean is a foot deep and that the ocean covers 2/3rds of the earth's surface... that is about 1*10^15 cubic meters or 10^21 cubic centimeters. And lets say there are a billion cells per CC (not unreasonable)...

    That's 10^24 cells for about 10^16 seconds or
    10^40 cell-seconds. Lets assume an evolutionary event (cell fission, DNA absorption, whatever) takes place once an hour per cell. That's about 3*10^37 evolutionary events. And that's just to get to the first multicellular creature!

    I think it would take a lot faster computers to get 10^37 events in a genetic algorithm!

    Of course, one can guide and tweak and limit... but I don't think a dragon is going to be forthcoming!!

    • Re:Methane (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I belive dragons are supposed to be fire-breathing, not fire-farting.
      • which will plummet to earth as soon as he let's fly a good long shot of hot fire breath.

        *Rooooaaaasssssstttt....... WHUMP!!!*

    • Re:Heathens (Score:3, Informative)

      by whm (67844)
      Besides, how can you can believe in evolution when it violates basic laws of the universe? There are so many arguments against evolution that it's ridiculous. Even those that ignore the written record of humanity cannot ignore the scientific facts making it impossible.

      I very highly suspect this as a troll, but I'll give it a go :)

      Evolutionists claim that universe the earth is billions of years old, but how is that possible when the rotation of the earth slows by 30 seconds every century? If the earth were billions of years old the speed at which it would have been rotating four years ago would have been so fast that it could not have held together.

      Er, 30 seconds every century indeed! More like 2.2 seconds every 100,000 years. Here [nasa.gov] are [navy.mil] some [prodigy.com] references [geocities.com].

      There's also the second law of thermodynamics to look at. It states that the universe is constantly heading toward disorder. Evolution violates that law, so which one is right?

      Well the second law of thermodynamics only makes sense when you understand what it's actually saying :P It says that the universe as a whole is moving towards disorder. This doesn't prevent portions of the universe from achieving states of increased order. And to think otherwise is completely absurd - if everything could only move in the direction of disorder, how could anything really get accomplished? This is a rediculous way to try and twist the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it reeks of manipulation.

      Another problem with evolution is that certain nucleic acids cannot form without the help of certain proteins, but those proteins cannot form without certain nucleic acids. That makes it impossible to occur naturally.

      Admittedly, I know nothing about nucleic acids and proteins, so I cannot comment on this.

      Oh well, so I got 2 out of 3. Perhaps somebody with a biology tilt can comment in on the proteins and acids. :P

      • I highly suspect that it is a troll too, but misguided trolls exist who just don't believe or understand or don't want to understand.

        The third component that you passed on is also known as the interlocking component conundrum, or the chicken-and-egg problem ('which came first...'), or the idea that when you have a complex system composed of multiple interdependent parts (e.g. the coagulation cascade of clotting factors in the blood, the DNA -> RNA -> protein -> multiple protein activities and A,T,C,G creating enzymes -> nuclear bases -> DNA system, etc.) then there must have been NO reason for the individual elements to have evolved on their own because they serve no purpose without their interdependent parts.

        This anti evolution argument has been expounded most strongly by Michael Behe, a chemist or biochemist, in his book Darwin's Black Box. The strongest counterargument is that proteins and other molecules do not simply play a single role. A protein that is known as Coagulation Factor X does not simply play a role in coagulating. It may also have other activites. And these other activities may have been selected for after they had arisen out of random mutation. Philip Johnson, a lawyer, is another anti-evolution creationist who has also published a few books on this topic. Rather than list any specific book that argues against Behe or Johnson, I recommend looking at general biology and biochemistry books.

        Evolution may be called a theory, but it is a well accepted theory that is buttressed by a strong scientific and evidentiary basis. Creationism is not.
        • And these other activities may have been selected for after they had arisen out of random mutation

          Also keep in mind that one of the most important factors in evolution is DNA exchange. Without the tremendous advantages this produces, the high individual costs and low odds of sexual reproduction would have prevented the evolution of sexual reproduction.

          Not also that bacteria engage in DNA exchange... this is one way that antibiotic resistance spreads. They have both a formal sort of DNA exchange... conjugating and exchanging DNA... and informal means (often used also in genetic engineering) of picking up DNA fragments, especially plasmids, from their environment.

          (sigh... and now come the responses... okay... yes... the "cost and odds of sex" rule applies most to males of the geek species)
      • I understand the argument about as a whole, but there is a whole bunch of math you can do based on the 2nd law, that makes evolution look impossible. I know it's not as simple as "the 2nd law equals disorder therefore evolution is not true", there is a whole bunch of complex math involved, but you should investigate it before shooting your mouth off.

    • Re:Heathens (Score:4, Informative)

      by junkgrep (266550) on Sunday August 25 2002, @03:02AM (#4135836)
      Whether or not this is a joke or not, we need a moderation that roughly sums up this: "these exact arguements, and the common rebuttals of them, have been posted on slashdot a million times before, and the discussions that inevitably come from them are both predictable and pointless."

      I mean seriously, "Dr." Putting aside ENTIRELY the issue of who's right in this case, you are either extremely ignorant of the wealth of debate on these subjects, or are just being grossly dishonest in simply glossing over it all in order to win cheap converts that you hope wont read or think any further.
      If you have any experience with creationist/evolution debates, you would know that all of these arguements have very good rebutals. Regardless of your opinion of these rebutals, the least you could do is address THEM, adding something new and intelligent to the actual living debate, instead of posting the same dumb starting challenges that almost everyone, even most creationists, agree are dishonest and misleading, and at the very least have hashed through a million times before. Or you could link to the hundreds of sites on the web that respond to things like the rotation question, or the question on entropy, and then criticize THEM.

      Instead, all you've done here is copy and paste (out of a recent reading of some tract, if not litterally via computer) some of the most well known creationist arguements. You are not surprising anyone with them. They are not new, damning charges against the theory of evolution: most of them were exposed a CENTURY ago, and well refuted even back then. All anyone does by posting them yet again is make modern creationism look stupid. Anyone who can state that evolution violates the second law is completely clueless about the second law (do endothermic chemical reactions violate the second law, going from simple atoms to complex molecules)? There are creationists out there who are at least willing to be honest and reasonable about their critiques: I suggest you join their ranks instead of preaching Hovind.
      • we need a moderation that roughly sums up this: "these exact arguements, and the common rebuttals of them, have been posted ... a million times before, and the discussions that inevitably come from them are both predictable and pointless."

        How about a Usenet rating?

    • Before I reply to this article, I would like to say that I am an Evangelical Christian. I believe in God, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that the Bible is the revealed work of the Holy Spirit. ... and I believe that we are here as the result of many years of evolution. I am aware that this thread is not about the evolution/creation debate, so I am not going to try to counter the poster's comments point for point. I would just like /.ers to know that there are Christians who can still think straight (at least in Germany). I believe in God because I find the evidence overwhelming. I believe in evolution because I find the evidence overwhelming. It belittles God and makes Christians look stupid when Christians say that evolution runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics, or when they point to mistakes that scientists have made in the past while trying to formulate the theory of evolution. If evolution could be so easily disproved, then I think the thousands of scientists who have studied evolution over the years would have worked this out by now. I am sure I will be flamed for this, but I am prepared to take the risk. However, I have written this for all the Cristians in the world who have not had their brains removed, who can worship God and marvel at the amazing things evolution has made. For these Christian (I know of many who hold this view, several educated to Doctorate level) there is no tension.
      • No, actually you belittle God and make Christians look stupid when you say His Bible is a lie. Go back, read Genesis one, and tell me again how Christianity is compatible with a world view that says we evolved from monkeys. And if you feel that having scientists on your side is necessary, check out Institute for Creation Research. [icr.org] There are quite a few Phd's who disagree strongly with you, and there's a lot of evidence that they're right.
          • The difference between the parable of the Good samaritan and the creation account is just as you said. A parable, by definition, is a story that is told to accentuate a point. It is not necessarily a true story, although it can be.

            The creation story in Genesis has NO elements of a parable. Whether you agree with it or not, you have to agree that whoever wrote it, wrote it as literal truth.

            And herein lies the rub: If the Bible cannot be trusted in the creation account, then why should it be trusted in John 3:16? How do we know that Jesus wasn't just another guy who said some interesting things? My original post was directed at a Christian -- if you don't believe the Bible at all, then all this is irrelevant. But if you claim to be a Christian, you'd better understand the difference between truth and fiction -- and you'd better understand that to deny Genesis 1 is also to deny Christ's death and resurrection. The two are linked -- if God allowed man to evolve through a process of millions of years of death and destruction, why do we need Jesus? Sin is just another name for natural selection, right? On the other hand, if you believe the Bible, that God created man perfect, in his image, without sin, the rest of the Bible makes sense. Without sin, we don't need a Saviour -- that's the real purpose of the myth of evolution: to deny God and his redemption plan. Like I said earlier -- if you don't believe in the Bible, this is unimportant to you. But if you're a Christian, you need to understand that this is why Genesis is so important.

          • The main difference is this: Genesis 1 specifically says God created the earth in 6 days. The hebrew word for day in this case is a specific word that means from morning to evening -- a literal 24 hour day. Now tell me this: How could the evolutionary process, which we have never in recorded history observed to occur, happen in six days? The evolutionary time scale requires millions upon millions of years to occur -- the Bible specifically states that the earth was created in six days.

            The thing about being created in God's image is a bit difficult for me to understand -- it's not clear if it means that we were created to physically look like God, or if he meant that we were created without sin. Either way, it does say that man was originally without sin -- it further explains how man came to do wrong against God later on in Genesis. This is one of the most important tenets of the Christian faith -- if God allowed the earth to simply evolve, using sin and death and destruction to create man (as the theory of evolution would have us believe), then why would he see the need to send his Son to earth to die for our sins(John 3:16)? If sin is just a natural process used by God to "create" the earth, then the rest of the Bible makes no sense, and has no real authority.

    • ... 5000 years (rougly the age of the earth).

      If what you say is true, then the Genesis is RIGHT. The guys that wrote it must have just been able to see earth forming with their own eyes!!! (Genesis is about 3000 BC) ...

      I believe in evolution, but not in hazardous evolution. It just doesn't make sense. The aceptance of the evolution theory can attest that you need some good hypotesis to make people believe in the most incredible improbabilities (like the elefants lifting the earth "plane" or evolution itself).
      • Open your eyes people! I could go on and on.

        Please do! I tried to take your lead, and find out more information on Google, but all I came up with was Giant Robots [giantrobot.com], Giant Squids [nasa.gov], and The Jolly Green Giant [roadsideamerica.com], who, incidentally, lives in Blue Earth MN, the birthplace of the ice cream sandwich. So if you would be so kind, and provide some links to these giants of which you speak, I would be much obliged.
      • ---What a joke, yet all the evolutionary theory based on this and the above debacles is still around. Why?---

        There is no why: you're a liar. The "Nebraska man," for instance, was never a widely accepted idea, not even as the tooth of an ape. That creationists continue to run around claiming that it was some sort of central lynchpin in evolutionary theory (an entirely laughable claim to anyone that bothers to read any sort of history of the subject, or the publications at the time) demonstrates only how desperate creationists are to discredit legitimate science: which, incidentally, works best BY discrediting things (like the Nebraska Man was discredited, by evolutionary scientists, not heroic creationists), not by building up frauds.
      • Just to point out how dishonest this story is... check out the real story here. [talkorigins.org]

        To summarize, there never was any life size replica, farmer, or any such nonsense. That story is entirely invented (and implausible to begin with: pig's teeth and primate teeth are so similar that experts often have a hard time telling them apart: and everyone at the time already knew this)
        What there was was a single drawing that appeared in a popular magazine, that itself never claimed to be any sort of "reconstruction from a tooth" but rather just a fanciful illustration. Here's the text that came with the sketch: "Mr. Forestier has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius. But if, as the peculiarities of the tooth suggest, Hesperopithecus was a primitive forerunner of Pithecanthropus, he may have been a creature such as Mr. Forestier has depicted." (Smith 1922, emphasis added)

        And that was about the MOST laudable thing ever said about the picture: again, not even in a scientific publication, but rather in a popular article. The scientific community never took it seriously that the teeth even came from an ape, much less a human ancestor.
    • Um ... we know perfectly well what they do: make copies of themselves. Now, the circumstances under which they make copies of themselves, and close analogues of themselves in RNA, is in most cases still an open question -- but simulations like this are an important step on the road to figuring that out. Of course it's trial and error; that's how science works.
    • That's not actually how artificial life works. They don't tell them that they need eyes or bigger muscles or whatever, they just eliminate the ones that are unsuccessful. This process leads to the development of things like eyes and muscles because the ones that developed those by the process of mutation tend to be culled less than those that didn't. Tom Ray's Tierra simulation has absolutely NO global rules and no specifications about what sort of things are expected to develop, and he gets complex ecological interactions such as parasites and hyperparasites.

      You have, however, hit on an important point. We know how to objectively judge box-pushing behavior, speed, and other physical measurements, so we can develop rule sets to encourage the development of traits to maximize those things. Quantifying intelligent behavior is much more difficult, making the evolution of intelligent behavior problematic. That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means that we need to think more on the difference between simple problem solving and true intelligence, and most importantly how to judge what intelligent behavior is without trying to figure out how to create it.
    • While still surviving in it ;) On a side note- How did everybody else go about developing spears and blades fo hunting and combat while the aboriginies came up with a revolving, self return airfoil as a weapon? Simulate that.

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