Richard Dawkins' Biomorphs demo

For anyone that has read the excellent book 'The Blind Watchmaker' by the Darwinian thinker Richard Dawkins, they will be familier with these strange biological figures, which are one of the most inspired ideas in the book. The concept is this: a set of variables, that represnt the 'genotype' of each organism, define the controlling mechanism as to how the organism is drawn, its 'embryology'. After each generation, random 'mutation' occurs in these variables, leading to small changes in the appearance of each creature, such as lengthening of one particular segment, compression of the organism into a tighter space, or the addition of further segments. Each of the five progeny produced are displayed on the screen, and the user can select the one that has the most aesthetic appeal (or some other logical or less logical selection criteria), and this organism is then entered for another round fo breeding and mutation. The idea is that, through Darwinian 'natural' selection by the user, organisms with specific characteristics can be bred out of the random influence of the mutation of the basic embryological form. The effects, even with my slightly less sophisticated attempt, can be startling. One of the most satifying strategies is to attempt to breed organic shapes: the frog-like biomorph shown left is one example of the results that can be achieved through only a few rounds of breeding. Those that have read Dawkins' book will be aware of the amazing variety of shapes that he managed to 'breed' by sustained and strategic effort: although my system differs from his in that I invented the criteria for the effect of the 'genotype' myself, I'm sure similar results could be achieved after a certain amount of effort. The program itself is remarkably simple: the SVGA graphics unit is used for all the (minimal) graphical workload, and the concept is written simply into strait pascal. This demo is available for download with full source.

Download the Biomorphs demo (31 Kb, zipped) | Back to Graphical Trinkets