User Guide
Portions of this text are adapted from the books and television programs ''The Blind Watchmaker'', ''Climbing Mount Improbable'', and ''Growing Up in the Universe'', Copyright Richard Dawkins and used by permission.
Evolution, the process by which new species arise from common ancestors, ordinarily happens very slowly, so that we may not be able to see the effects of evolution in a single human lifetime. But we can imitate evolution on the computer, speeding up the process so that we can see evolution happening very quickly. The Blind Watchmaker suite of programs by Richard Dawkins does this using creatures called "biomorphs." (There was originally only one species of biomorph, now called 'monochrome biomorphs', and it is this monochrome species which we will use for the following examples.)
These are 'biomorphs'. The biomorph in the center square is the parent biomorph, and around her are eight biomorph offspring. The offspring resemble the parent closely, but there may be differences -- 'mutations'.
The images of the biomorphs are not stored in the computer before the program runs. Instead, the biomorphs are 'grown' from a set of numbers inside the computer called 'genes', by analogy with the genes we carry within living cells. The collection of genes that determines the makeup of a particular biomorph is called its 'genome,' and the process by which the program constructs the body ('phenotype') of the biomorph is the biomorph's 'embryology'.
Here are the genes for the parent biomorph in the above diagram.
The Watchmaker program allows us to 'breed' biomorphs, by selecting one of the offspring as the parent of a new 'litter' of biomorphs (we are also permitted to breed a new litter from the same parent biomorph as before.) The biomorph in the upper left square looks the most strikingly different from its parent. If we select that biomorph, it moves to the center, and becomes the parent of a new litter:
Each offspring resembles its parent because it is 'grown' from a set of 'genes' copied faithfully from the parent's genes. After they are copied, the program randomly selects one or more of the genes and applies a 'mutation', a random change to the gene's numeric value. Here is the genome for the parent biomorph in the first generation again, followed by the genome for the offspring we selected to be the parent of the next generation.
If we compare the two genomes closely, we can see several differences, mutations introduced by the program. For example, the second gene has changed from a value of -20 in the parent to a value of -25 in its offspring. Other mutations have taken place in genes 4, 5, 6 and 7.