Richard Dawkins, ‘Evolution of Evolvabity.’ In Langton, C.G. Artificial Life: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Avalon Publishing, 201 (1989).
A title like “The Evolution of Evolvability” ought to be anathema to a dyed in-the-wool, radical neo-Darwinian like me! Part of the reason it isn’t is that I really liave been led to think differently as a result of creating, and using, computer models of artificial life which, on the face of it, owe more to the imagination than to real biology. The use of artificial life, not as a formal model of real life but as a generator of insight in our understanding of real life, is one that I want to illustrate in this paper. With a program called Blind Watchmaker, I created a world of two- dimensional artificial organisms on the computer screen. Borrowing the word used by Desmond Morris for the animal-like shapes in his surrealistic paintings," I called them biomorphs. My main objective in designing Blind Watchmaker was to reduce to the barest minimum the extent to which I designed biomorphs. I wanted as much as possible of the biology of biomorphs to emerge. All that I would design was the conditions-ideally very simple conditions–under which they might energe. The process of emergence was to be evolution by the Darwinian process of random mutation followed by nonrandom survival. Once a Darwinian process gets going in a world, it has an open-ended power to generate surprising consequences: us, for example. But, before any Darwinian process can get going, there has to be a bare minimum group of conditions set up. These were the conditions that I had to engineer in my computer world.