Explore Abiogenesis and the selective pressures from which arise Evolution?

Donate for a dedicated server. A dedicated server allows digital petri dishes to run even when your computer is turned off. Just like a real lab; come back the next day and see what's happened





As soon as someone doesn't see the results they expect, someone will claim, Jerry's petri dish engine must not work correctly.

My friends,

As a computer programmer, my first task in every job, is to identify the assumptions. All the assumptions. The vast majority of which most people are completely unaware in most real life tasks. For a programmer, missing a single assumption is intolerable. What's more we get instant feedback when we do miss something.

Most people blunder through life never even knowing when they have failed to identify all the assumptions for a given task, blaming failure on more comfortable sources. While programmers are faced with repeated, dogged, unrelenting, definitive feedback and are forced to learn the intellectual skills needed to quickly identify all assumptions.

While many evolutionary simulations attempt simulations of specific features of evolution, my petri dish relies upon only two assumptions. This is how we can be confident that it works. It does NOTHING more. If these two assumptions are correct, then the results must be correct. It assumes mutation and those natural selection pressures which the efficacy of self replication affords. That's IT!

The software presumes that complex molecular systems of any kind "get jiggled," once in a while, altering them. You control how often this happens in the simulation parameters. It also presumes that a sufficiently complex system can be arraigned in such a way as to effect its own replicate itself. Again, you set the parameters for how complex and how robust replication.

Nothing more is needed to produce this simulation. And the results are independent of the system. It could be chemicals, or paperclips, -- star dust or magic sprinkles. It doesn't matter. So long as those assumptions apply, the results are accurate.

Good hunting.