Winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2004 Science Journalism Award
Carl Zimmer is the author of several popular science books and writes frequently for the New York Times, as well as for magazines including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Science, Newsweek, Popular Science, and Discover, where he is a contributing editor. Carl's books include Soul Made Flesh,,
Parasite Rex and Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea. His latest book is Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins. Please send newsworthy items or feedback to blog-at-carlzimmer.com.
"...among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters, heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."
--Moby Dick
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Not long ago I had a remarkable experience: I got to visit the nursery for what might prove to be a new form of life. At Michigan State University, a group of computer scientists, biologists, and philosophers run the Digital Evolution Laboratory. There, they are developing software called Avida which allows them to create virtual worlds swarming with digital organisms. Avida's residents show a lot of the important features that scientists consider essential requirements for life. Their evolution is particularly impressive, because it parallels evolution in the wet world in all sorts of subtle ways. And because you can run through a hundred thousand generations in a matter of hours, the Avida team can carry out experiments on some of the most important aspects of evolution that biologists could previously only study by looking at the natural world.
For more details, you can read my cover story in the February issue of Discover.
A (philosophically) interesting outgrowth of this sort of project is the possibility that we are living in such a computer simulation.
See, for example, the "simulation argument" article at
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
John Barrow wrote an interesting brief article on the possibility in _New Scientist_:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17823985.200
yikes.
greg
Wait till this type of software becomes available to evolve the DNA used in human reproduction.
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Soul Made Flesh
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea (2001)
Parasite Rex (2000)
At the Water's Edge (1998)
