Biology Issues
In an effort to understand the incredibly intricate processes
that power living things, many scientists are looking to ALife as the
key to a broader understanding of many biological mysteries. Foremost
of these areas of research is the study of evolution itself. Since
the time of Charles Darwin, the scientist most directly responsible
for the proliferation of evolutionary theory, much research has been
done in this area. Now, however, a new breed of scientists are using
ALife as a tool to answer what is, perhaps, mankind's oldest question "How
did we get here?"
Everybody agrees upon the basic premise of evolution, Darwin's
immortal "natural selection" hypothesis is the foundation of all
serious work done in the area today. But exactly how life diversified
(just what caused individual organisms to evolve) is still largely
unknown. Speculations abound, but the simple fact is that, in the
real world, evolution cannot be studied because it is a process rather
than a single occurance. That is, evolution is something that taken
hundreds of millions of years to occur, and therefore cannot be
"proven" by a laboratory experiment or study.... Until the advent of
ALife, that is. Using supercomputers, scientist hope to test the
various evolutionary theories in a virtual reality environment and see
which ones turn out to be the most feasible.
This is a monumental task, and one that will require the
knowledge and insight of scientists from many separate fields.
Biologists, programmers, engineers, philosophers, mathematicians, etc.
will all have to play apart if mankind is ever to find the answer for
which he has been searching through all of history.