Is this really evolution?
Comparing evolutionary art and evolution in nature
NB This isn't the text we're presenting to the public - just some rough-and-ready notes summarising the content of these pages, for anyone evaluating this site:
Arguably, the artificial evolution on this site is quite like natural evolution - but it's a cruder, far less flexible version of the real thing. Artificial and natural evolution both use random mutation and natural selection to create a diversity of artefacts (living things or artworks) from very simple raw materials.
In nature, random mutation and natural selection create miniscule changes in organisms, as they breed from generation to generation. These changes accumulate over millions of generations, enabling a huge diversity of life to emerge. In our art apps, we're breeding pictures not living things. We make a population of random artworks, judge how 'fit' they are and let the fittests ones breed the next generation of artworks. Fitness might be a measure of how symmetrical an artwork is, for instance, or how well it camouflages another picture.
As the artworks breed - i.e. pair up and randomly share their attributes with each other - we also introduce random mutations. These can be thought of as occassional little copying mistakes that add some variation to the next generation. This fitness assessment - which is a crude version of natural selection - coupled with the random mutation enables all sorts of artworks to emerge.
On these pages, we also discuss the limitations of our simple algorithms - notably the crude fitness functions, the inability of the structure of the genome itself to evolve and the rather suspect hand-coding of the genome itself.
Things to look out for
Here, we highlight some interesting similarities between our artificial evolution and evolution in nature.
For instance, if you run our Monkey Squares app several times, you'll always generate something that looks like a monkey - but each time you run it, the monkey will be created from different combinations of shapes. This is convergent evolution at work. Convergent evolution can also be seen in nature - for instance, a bat and a bird both fly. Both have evolved bodies with aerofoil shaped-wings, giving them plenty of lift, but the bat's wing didn't evolve from the birds. And the bird's didn't evolve from the bat's.
Philosophical questions
Here, we shall use our simple evolutoinary apps to introduce some of the open research questions in evolutionary biology For instance, we're using a ready-made genome - just as that famous monkey used a ready-made typewriter. But what 'typewriter' does nature use? Assuming it's the genome, then this structure of nature's typewriter is itself evolving - and scientists are still puzzling over how it got there in the first place. How did life bootstrap itself from the raw materials that were available on early earth? How you can create a self-replicating machine - if you haven't yet made the machine to create it?