
Climb Mount Improbable: Evolvable Critters in JavaScript - darwinwhy
https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/www.mountimprobable.com/index.html
======
taliesinb
Beautifully done!

Blind Watchmaker had a big impact on me as a kid. After I had read it, I
programmed my own take on the biomorphs program and sent a copy of my program
to Richard Dawkins. His research assistant Yan Wong replied with a very
complimentary email. I wish I still had the email.

I've been playing with evolutionary algorithms ever since, such as
[https://taliesin.ai/projects/science/floatworld/](https://taliesin.ai/projects/science/floatworld/)

~~~
amflare
I've been looking to get into evolutionary algorithms and micro-worlds similar
to floatworld. Do you have any advice on good resources to start with?

~~~
taliesinb
At the bottom of the page I linked are some resources. But you can take a look
at the most recent alife conferences like... ALife and GECCO to see what
people are up to these days.

------
joelthelion
This old windows screensaver is one of the best illustrations of artificial
life and evolution I've ever seen:
[http://www.ultimatesavers.com/index.asp?ID=1381](http://www.ultimatesavers.com/index.asp?ID=1381)

The source is here, it seems :
[https://github.com/jondo/primlife](https://github.com/jondo/primlife). But I
don't know if it runs on modern OSes.

Edit: it seems to run fine with Wine!

~~~
Buttons840
Finally! I found that screensaver. I've been meaning to recreate it as a
learning exercise.

I once observed a mass extinction on this screensaver. A very aggressive
carnivore (meaning it survived by eating other organisms in the sim),
reproduced like crazy, used up all the resources and the died out itself. I
only ever observed this once, despite watching the screensaver quite a bit.

------
gwern
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12024217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12024217)
(original site has linkrot)

~~~
darwinwhy
Did you own the domain and redirect it to Dawkins' publisher's website?

~~~
gwern
No, they did that. A pity, because even the original AWS S3 bucket is still
up.

~~~
ottersarecool
I was involved in the making of this but unfortunately have no control over
their use of the domain. I have Penguin's permission to publish a new version
of it however, though I haven't had the time to really look into it further.
I'm glad a copy was saved!

~~~
gwern
You're welcome. I am happy to host it indefinitely for you, and update it if
you want to fix any of the bug reports like scrolling or issues with too many
samples.

------
dfee
It was difficult, but I was able to evolve a line. It didn’t let me go
further, unfortunately. Would’ve been cool to evolve a point.

------
marvindanig
Beautiful all right, but why do this?:

* {
    
    
        box-sizing: border-box;
    
        -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;
    
        -webkit-user-select: none;
    
        -moz-user-select: none;
    
        -ms-user-select: none;
    
        user-select: none;

}

No text on the site is selectable but this is a terrible thing to do. Not cool
at all.

~~~
Scaevolus
That's commonly done for interactive experiences or games where fast clicking
selecting text or elements would be aggravating.

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shaunxcode
This is really nice. However it would be cool if the original macintosh
source/app could be handed off to internet archive so you could play with it
in an emulator in browser. The screenshot of the original got me excited!

~~~
ottersarecool
The original code can be found here:
[https://github.com/Aronnax9000/WatchmakerSuite/tree/master/d...](https://github.com/Aronnax9000/WatchmakerSuite/tree/master/docs/Dawkins)

------
MaxBarraclough
For me it seemed to get stuck showing _You 've bred more than 50 children.
Zoom out to see how far you've come_. It failed to notice when I then zoomed
out.

I'm using Firefox, I wonder if that matters.

~~~
josephcsible
Not a Firefox issue. The same happened to me in Chrome.

~~~
yongjik
If you click 50 more times you get another message. If you click a few
hundreds(?) more you get the third message... after that I lost interest.
Looks like there's no objectives or hidden goals in this "game", the objective
is just to keep clicking aimlessly. Kinda fitting the theme...

------
it
I find Dawkins's approach to all this incredibly implausible. Think about it.
How does a population of creatures split into multiple different
reproductively incompatible species via chance mutations? A much more
believable mechanism for speciation would be something repeatable like genes
being spliced in by a virus, or a new symbiosis like what Lynn Margulis
describes in her book Symbiotic Planet. Edit: Nice demo though. And maybe it
could be fun to do one based on viruses or symbioses.

~~~
jmcgough
Most genetic modification by viruses is deleterious, as are most random
genetic mutations.

Part of endosymbiotic theory is pretty well accepted now (I remember being
told in school that mitochondria may have come from prokaryotic cells), but
it's a bit optimistic to think that symbiosis causes all speciation. It's very
conceivable that most speciation is caused through many generations of
reproduction, environmental stressors and separation.

~~~
yters
Then what is the engine of evolution? This is a point that I see repeatedly
glossed over. First it's random mutation. Then random mutation is mostly bad.
So, then the secret is natural selection. But what is natural selection? Is it
merely survival and reproduction? Finally, when the author gets around to
giving an example of 'natural selection' that actually works, they always give
an example of human (livestock breeding, biomorphs, etc.) or animal driven
selection (Koonin's lamarckianism or Shapiro's natural genetic engineering).
This is always directed and purposeful, the very thing that evolution is not
supposed to be. It seems the authors cannot get their story straight for
whatever reason.

~~~
c1ccccc1
Yes, the engine of selection is just survival and reproduction. This, combined
with random mutations is pretty much all you need for evolution to happen. In
an artificial environment, survival and reproduction can be affected by
humans, but selection happens in natural environments too. In the applet, the
user plays the role of the environment, since that makes things interesting
for you as the user.

But one can imagine a (perhaps more boring) applet where the computer makes
the choice for you. Maybe the computer always selects the biggest critter to
reproduce. Then, even though there is no intelligent overseer, the critters
will tend to get larger and larger. Or one can imagine a more complicated
selection process involving a physics simulation where a bunch of copies of
the critter are dropped on top of one another in a pile. The tallest pile is
selected to reproduce. Over time, one would tend to see critters that were
good at stacking on top of one another, maybe they would be rectangular like
bricks, or maybe they would have lots of spines so they could stick together
like burrs. Or maybe evolution would hit upon something else. But there is no
need for the selection process to be intelligent.

Of course, in those examples, you might say that whoever wrote the objective,
like "grow big", or "stack in tall piles" is still directing the process from
behind the computer program. That's why in the natural world, we don't have
objectives like that. Instead, the only "objective" in the natural world is
"survive and reproduce", since that is tautologically what determines
reproductive success. There is a freely available software application called
"biogenesis" that shows evolution using that objective function in a world
with greatly simplified physics, if you are curious.

There are certainly plenty of examples of evolution being driven by the
natural environment, even if the books tend to focus on things like
evolutionary arms races, symbiosis, and sexual selection. Here is one: An
organism that can convert a molecule of glucose to more molecules of ATP than
its neighbours can will be able to use its food more efficiently than them.
This will give it an edge in survival and reproduction, since it needs less
food to do the same amount of stuff. So the genes that enable this more
efficient metabolism will tend to spread throughout the population, because
the organisms that bear them will be less likely to die of starvation.

------
yters
Currently reading Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins repeatedly says the most important
thing about evolution is that it is unguided. Then he proceeds to demonstrate
how evolution works with a guided computer simulation. I think I'm missing
something.

~~~
joshuak
Because as Dawkins points out you cannot intentionally evolve a target
species. You can intentionally select from a set of results to influence
future results, but you cannot produce a particular result intentionally.

~~~
yters
even proximate results being selected is intentionality. i.e. i select a more
simple design, then one with an interesting whorl, then one that looks like a
bug. all that is intentional. or his example of butterflies selecting
butterfly like biomorphs. again intentional, but at the insect level

it seems all very ambiguous what dawkins is trying to argue. if i try to make
his argument rigorously worded it falls apart

------
andrewla
Dawkins was a huge influence on me as a youth, but his recent musings [1] have
made me realize that he does not really have more than a shallow understanding
of evolution. This in turn has made me reluctant to revisit the books (Selfish
Gene and Blind Watchmaker) that influenced me so much, for fear that I'll see
more of the same shallow thought that equates evolution with selective
breeding.

In this link the problem I see is that he is too focused on the mechanic of
change. The trick of evolution is not random mutations, etc., but has to do
with statistical properties of large population groups. A population that is
of sufficient size will have variation within the constraints of the fitness
function. How those variations are achieved is not really even that important
except as regards the rate of evolution, rather than the effect of it.

But the fitness function is extremely complex; it's not just changing a few
parameters. A population of land-dwellers is largely indifferent to the
ability to float; so some creatures can float better, others float worse, but
it doesn't matter. But at some point the floaters get good enough at floating
that they can actually swim, and now there's a whole new fitness landscape to
explore. And the fitness function can change over time.

The most important thing is variation -- that's the "anti-fragile" hook that
makes life so tenacious.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/122894368695366451...](https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1228943686953664512)
\-- "It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral
grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of
course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth
wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology."

~~~
champagneben
Why do you think his "musings" are wrong? Seems like something very obvious to
me, but I'm a complete lay person in this regard.

~~~
andrewla
The trick of it is that you can certainly practice selective breeding on
humans. If you want taller humans, you can breed taller humans. Unethical,
etc., but would work.

That is not what eugenics is. Dawkins might just have misunderstood what
eugenics was as an applied science, but it would be egregious in itself if so.

Eugenics is the idea that we can "improve" the human stock through selective
breeding, especially by excluding "undesirables". Any attempt to do this
(unless you are omniscient) actually has the opposite effect -- variety is the
fuel of evolution, not selection. Attempts to limit variability do things like
create monocultures and other very dangerous and fragile systems. Acceptable
risk for agriculture because our use cases are narrow (dangerous but mitigated
by the fact that different strains are kept active for different purposes for
most food stock), but for humans it would be a disaster.

It's a mistake to think that ethics is the only thing that prevents us from
engaging in large-scale eugenics -- it's just an application of a
misunderstanding of the underlying science; like trying to create a Maxwell's
Daemon for your perpetual motion machine.

~~~
westoncb
> That is not what eugenics is

You are concluding that an accomplished scientist in evolutionary biology has
a shallow understanding of evolution on the basis of a tiny linguistic sample,
with an argument that hinges on the definition of one word which you each may
just be using with different emphases.

It seems pretty obvious you have other reasons for wanting to discredit him
than your estimate of his competence as a scientist. (On the remote chance
this isn't the case: you would benefit immensely by re-considering the
practicalities and limitations of informal natural language communication.)

I mean, what is more likely here: you have incorrectly deduced his
incompetence from the basis of a single remark he made on twitter, or that his
colleagues at top universities for decades have been continually imagining his
competence?

~~~
andrewla
I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that this tweet alone is how I
concluded anything about Dawkins. This tweet was just the most egregious
example that I could find, and really made me reconsider whether my admiration
of him as a scientist and spokesperson for evolutionary theory was well-
placed. There are others [1], not to mention his various appearances on
podcasts etc., and more long-form blog posts on his site where he reiterates
these things (those are harder to dig up, and I'm too lazy to do so at the
moment).

The site linked to in this article is an older example of his thought process,
seen through the lens of interpretation, and is a very shallow view of some
purported mechanics of evolution. Maybe just useful for illustrating some
concepts without attempting to showcase the entirety of evolutionary theory,
but worrying, because he never addresses the fundamental ideas of complexity
and statistical dispersion of a population, at least in anything that I've
seen.

I don't think he's incompetent, just that his understanding (or maybe, just
his explanations, to be generous) of evolution are very shallow. Maybe he's
just stopped thinking; relying more on his own beliefs and less on the path he
took to arrive at them. Collecting rent on his position as a popularizer of
evolutionary theory.

In terms of "other reasons", I'll try to address that. I align strongly with
almost all of his publicly held beliefs -- I am an atheist, though less anti-
religion[2], I am pro-evolution, though less mechanism-oriented. My
conclusions have no motivation beyond a desire to assign some prior believe in
his future statements.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/531154466255667200](https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/531154466255667200),
[https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/111203295062165913...](https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1112032950621659136)
(this one is the worst),
[https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/313323444299251713](https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/313323444299251713)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/110833954764401049...](https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1108339547644010496)

~~~
westoncb
Maybe all the information you're actually basing this stance on is through
hours of listening to podcasts and reading long-form blog posts—but the only
things you're citing as evidence are tweets, and the group of them suffers
from the same problem I was initially pointing out:

They are all extremely politically charged except one, and completely
insufficient for the purposes of judging his thinking as a scientist (no way
to definitively tie his brief informal statements to some particular line of
thought—there's enough ambiguity for a reader to read what they'd like into
them).

So if a reader comes along and looks at the sources you've cited, all they
walk away with is an impression of Dawkins' (implied) political alignment (in
reality his comments probably have nothing to do with political thinking).

Maybe that's your intention, maybe not, but at the end of the day you have
unambiguously:

1\. Brought his competence into question (or "depth of understanding" if you
prefer—though it's the same thing insofar as the effective execution of his
work depends on having depth of understanding)

2\. Cited as evidence for this: small, ambiguous, politically charged
linguistic samples.

We have enough places in life and on the internet where arguments are made on
that basis. Hacker News is a nice reprieve from it for the most part—which is
my only reason for calling this out. I have no interest in Dawkins and haven't
personally followed his work since Selfish Gene times, and I disagree with his
anti-religion stuff too. But I also highly value having _some_ place on the
internet where the conversation doesn't have to center around who to dislike
because they're on the wrong side of the discourse.

