Test natural selection yourself
Still unconvinced about natural selection? It's no big deal – natural selection can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around. Here we have an applet where you can do natural selection yourself. Hopefully, being able to see natural selection at work in front of your very eyes will convince you that mutations and selection pressures can have profound effects on organisms.
What we've got here is a java applet, written by Mark Jones, that will let you see natural selection happening on a picture called a "biomorph". A biomorph is an orderly combination of pixels, whose shape and color is controlled by a number of "genes." All the examples on the left were created using this applet. These biomorphs are created by 15 genes.
Clicking the button will open up a window with twelve boxes in it. The box in the top left (which is a different color) is the parent biomorph. The other eleven are its offspring. Only one of the offspring will survive to reproduce – click on the biomorph you want to survive. This biomorph then becomes the parent, and eleven new biomorphs are generated as its offspring. Each biomorph has a mutation in one of its genes.
When you're choosing
which biomorph you want to
survive, you're exerting a selection pressure. If you select towards
the same trait every time (say, size, complexity, or general
attractiveness), you'll see how the biomorphs change accordingly over
time. If you choose for a different trait every time, you're exerting
rapidly changing selection pressures, and the biomorphs will vary
greatly over time.
The biomorphs start out as only one pixel large, so you might have to squint to see the first few generations. Navigating away from this page will close the biomorph window.
Credit to Mark Jones for writing this applet, Richard Dawkins for coming up with this idea, and Desmond Morris for coining the term "biomorph."
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