Evolution

For those of you who feel like taking a bit of a plunge into the digital domain of high-tech genomic and evolutionary sciences please Google "Avida". This will take you to CalTech and there Digital Evolution Lab. They have developed software that spawns mini-programs, similar to computer viruses, that can be controled. They use these the same way others have used Bacteria and Viruses in the quest to determine if Evolution is everything it states that it is. What they have discovered is that Darwin was pretty much right on the money.

You can download the software free of charge and do your own genomic research. Of course it requires some information that I don't have. But I was able to take a single organism and see how many variations I got after 50,000 generations.

Read Discover Mag. Jan 2005 to learn more. Ironically the main source of bug detection and beta testing has been the Creationist community. They have been so bent on proving the program flawed that they have litteraly taken it apart. The problem for them is that, though they have found the odd bug or two, by and large the program seems to be solid. What makes the program rock is that you can, in a matter of hours, crank out genetic mutations and new spieces of of mini-programs over thousands of generations. Read the article to get a better picture of it.