Everybody knows the biomorphs of Richard Dawkins. With a simple program, in his book "The Blind Watchmaker," he showed how easy it is to create what seems like insects or other animals, and to let them evolve. This is a nifty demonstration of evolution, as described by Charles Darwin in "The Origin of Species," in 1859: random mutations, but fundamentally non-random selection.
Unfortunately, Dawkins used only the properties of mutations to evolve his creatures. I thought his program was incomplete without the use of crossover between the two chromosomes of the parents. So, I wrote a new variation, in Java, that combines the effects of mutations and crossovers.
You can see a version of this program, morphs, in Java (sorry, only with Netscape 2.0, Internet Explorer 3.0, Hotjava 1.0 and later).
December 16, Alain Gogniat
