[Ichneumon]

The problem with this program is that there are no predators to come along and eat up the evolving life forms.

Are you sure? I didn't see enough in the write-up to answer that issue one way or the other.

Furthermore, I've done some ALife evolution of my own, and the little buggers evolved predator-prey relationships *all by themselves* (as well as "viral" and "parasitic" modes of success) without me putting it in originally.

In any case, why would it *have* to have predation to get results?

The ALife has been left alone to change on its own without worrying about becoming someone else's dinner.

So? There are plenty of other selective pressures and reproductive hazards other than getting literally eaten.

So if you have some partial adaptation, for example, a proto eye that confers no real advantage to you, you may not live the 100,000 generations is supposedly takes for a real eye to evolve and become useful.

That grossly misstates the situation. First, proto-eyes are at least partially useful from the start. They don't have to wait "100,000 generations" to "become useful". Even a poor light-sensing organ is better than none (and plenty of real-life organisms get by just fine with nothing more than "is it dark or is it light" sensors).

Second, while it's true that the first thing with a primitive eyespot might get eaten (or lose the "rat race" of life in any other number of ways), all it takes is for one to eventually *not* get eaten (i.e., successfully reprodue) to start the path down the road to bigger and better things. It's not the offspring that fail which write the "book of life", it's the ones that manage to beat the odds and make it anyway.

[plusone]

Very interesting reply. My point about predation is that if the researchers want to mimic an 'early world' type of scenario, then predation must be oart of the picture. But maybe you are corrext and these things are part of the program. It does sound like an interesting experiment. Religious folks will dismiss this, saying that you, by designing and running the experiment, as well as setting the rules and parameters for it to follow (not to mention the fact that you 'created' the computer world for this virtual evolution to exist) are in fact playing the part of God. The Religionists will say (and I think correctly) that this is an attempt at recreating the '6 days of Genesis' and does not try to validate pure, non-Divine Evolutionism at all. The debate about the proto eye is something I've carried over from other threads. I've yet to get a good answer from the Evo's about how such a complex system as vision can evolve by chance. (And this goes beyond just the mechanics of the eye, to include the nerves, muscles, and most importantly, the neural pathways within the brain necessary to allow the mind to understand the perception of sight.) Thanks.