Computer life

More on computer life forms (HT: The Panda's Thumb

If you want to find alien life-forms, hold off on booking that trip to the moons of Saturn. You may only need to catch a plane to East Lansing, Michigan. <snip> These are digital organisms-strings of commands-akin to computer viruses. Each organism can produce tens of thousands of copies of itself within a matter of minutes. Unlike computer viruses, however, they are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates. A software program called Avida allows researchers to track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a computer screen like waterfalls.

So what does it mean for computer code to "evolve"?

In the late 1990s Ofria's former adviser, physicist Chris Adami of Caltech, set out to create the conditions in which a computer program could evolve the ability to do addition. He created some primitive digital organisms and at regular intervals presented numbers to them. At first they could do nothing. But each time a digital organism replicated, there was a small chance that one of its command lines might mutate. On a rare occasion, these mutations allowed an organism to process one of the numbers in a simple way. An organism might acquire the ability simply to read a number, for example, and then produce an identical output. Adami rewarded the digital organisms by speeding up the time it took them to reproduce. If an organism could read two numbers at once, he would speed up its reproduction even more. And if they could add the numbers, he would give them an even bigger reward. Within six months, Adami's organisms were addition whizzes. “We were able to get them to evolve without fail,” he says. But when he stopped to look at exactly how the organisms were adding numbers, he was more surprised. “Some of the ways were obvious, but with others I'd say, 'What the hell is happening?' It seemed completely insane.”

Ultimately, these digital organisms would begin to mimic items biologists associate with living things.

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And one little item for those who argue that random variation and natural selection can't create new species...

...Lenski's own research. Since 1988 he has been running the longest continuous experiment in evolution. He began with a single bacterium-Escherichia coli-and used its offspring to found 12 separate colonies of bacteria that he nurtured on a meager diet of glucose, which creates a strong incentive for the evolution of new ways to survive. Over the past 17 years, the colonies have passed through 35,000 generations. In the process, they've become one of the clearest demonstrations that natural selection is real. All 12 colonies have evolved to the point at which the bacteria can replicate almost twice as fast as their ancestors. At the same time, the bacterial cells have gotten twice as big.

With sexually reproducing organisms, any two populations that don't reproduce with each other in the wild are different species. This definition breaks down with asexual organisms, so it's harder to tell of these would qualify as new species. However, I suspect anyone looking at the descendents would say they are very different species from their ancestors.

Anyway, RTWT.