A few months ago someone made a comment that he had difficulty reconciling evolution's reliance on Random Mutation with what he saw as Ordered Change over time as the environment changes. This set me thinking, would it be possible to simulate such random changes and couple them with a changing environment to see what might happen.This post gives a brief flavour of what I managed to achieve - taking a VERY simplified organism, in a VERY simple world. Throw in a bit of programming, and out comes a simple Windows program which allows the user to play with the numbers and see the results. The image on the right is one such output - a single organism (at the top) living in an environmental niche (the green stripe) reproduces and multiplies over successive generations (the grey/black stripes down the image). It soon populates the whole width of the niche, though individuals tend to die out or fail to reproduce at the extremes of the niche. Then the environment changes - shifting from green to orange - and the random mutations over the generations allow the population to 'adapt' to the changes. BUT then the environment shifts more quickly - from orange back to green and over to blue. The rate of 'evolution' within the population can't keep pace, and the entire population dies out. Woops! Extinction!
A more complete explanation of the model can be found in this PDF (590kb) which also explains how to use the software, which is available in this ZIP file (2.7mb). As I say in the notes - Go Play!
