Having always been one who needs to have a full understanding of a topic for it not to bother me, biology was never my thing. It felt like pure memorization to me, because I never really did comprehend what was happening and why. My dad handed me this book called “Would Be Worlds”, with the caption on the front, “How Simulation is Changing the Frontiers of Science”. I thought, this seems interesting, simulation uses patterns to create models that mimic different concepts. However, I became less thrilled when biology was mentioned in the second chapter. Richard Dawkins of Oxford University… genes… natural selection… I’ve heard it all before. Living systems… mutation… biomorphs... What the heck is a biomorph?! As I mentioned before, I hate not knowing things, not understanding things. I read the page about biomorphs, and I read it again. “In Biomorphland, one begins with a kind of stick figure. This skeletal object is then mutated in accordance with a set of rules, creating a spectrum of offspring that are each determined by a single genetic mutation” (Casti 38). I stared at the diagram on the next page. I understood that it was a simulation of natural selection. That was about it. I looked up the term and found plenty of extremely technical articles on how biomorphism worked. I still didn’t quite understand the concept. That was until I came across a website simulation. It started with a random, skeletal shape, and it had slightly mutated shapes around it. You could choose which shape you wanted to start with next, and the process would continue to repeat as you chose slightly mutated shapes. Let me show you what I mean. Here is an example simulation, which I found on http://www.emergentmind.com/biomorphs. The middle skeleton is the starting shape, and you can click on any of the outside shapes to start with for the next round. Each of the surrounding shapes has a small mutation, and you are the person controlling which mutations “survive”. I played around with this for a very long time. It was fun trying to make the frog-like skeleton evolve into something specific. For example, I tried to make changes so it would become as close to a straight, vertical line as possible. Here’s what I came up with. I think I succeeded.
But after challenging myself to create skeletons that I pictured in my head, I wondered what the practical application of this simulation was. The simplicity of these shapes do not even come close to mimicking organisms on Earth today. As Would-Be Worlds put it, “Biomorphs do not actually do anything.” So what can we learn from studying biomorphs? The simplest answer to this question is the evolution of the shapes of organisms. If we can make predictions of what natural factors result in specific mutations, we can understand what different organisms evolved from and what they may evolve into. However, the fact that we are able to create this type of evolution on a computer screen provides us with hope for the future of simulation. Already, more advanced concepts are being formulated, and we are starting to utilize technology more to predict or explain something about real-world problems. Let me know if you think of other ways that simulation is being used as a model to predict the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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AuthorKatie Zelvin Archives
September 2020
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