An Evolutionary Approach to Synthetic Biology: Zen and the Art of Creating Life

Making the Artificial Real

“…Other authors have proposed Alife simulations that fall along similar lines (Bonabeau and Theraulaz 1994;Ray 1994;Miller 1995), noting that evolutionary biologists are burdened with a paucity of evidence with which to reconstruct the evolutionary course of life on Earth. The fossil record is notoriously incomplete, and our vanishingly small time on Earth has allowed precious few opportunities to observe even the species which exist around us today.…”

“…Genetic algorithms, which allow programs to follow a process of evolution in line with a defined 'fitness function' to produce more capable programs, were applied to digital organisms which attempted to compete and reproduce rather than simply solve a task (Ray 1994). Similarly, cellular automata displayed remarkable complexity despite being derived from very simple rules; such a concept of 'emergent behaviour' came to underwrite much of Alife in the years to come.…”

“…Creating simulations which display life-like behaviours using only simple rule-sets seemed a powerful metaphor for the complexity of life deriving from the interactions of genes and proteins. Ray (1994) and Langton (1992) were early proponents of the Strong Alife view. Ray contended that his Tierra simulation, in which small programs competed for memory space in a virtual CPU, displayed an incredible array of varied 'species' of digital organisms.…”

Filterscape: Energy Recycling in a Creative Ecosystem

“…Consumers are heterotrophic organisms, such as herbivores and carnivores, that rely on eating other organisms to survive. In systems such as Tierra [12] we see a slightly more complex food chain with the emergence of parasites which are secondary consumers -agents that exploit other agents to obtain energy.…”

The World of Framsticks: Simulation, Evolution, Interaction

“…Although the simulation captures currently only a subset of properties of the natural world, its assumptions are inspired by natural laws [2,17]. Moreover, the properties included are rich enough to allow a host of interactions to develop.…”