Researcher Christoph Adami Describes the Evolution of Digital “Organisms”

Using some ingenious computer methods, Christoph Adami and his colleagues have studied how generations of rapidly proliferating digital “organisms” can evolve traits that appear to be irreducibly complex.

The work has been cited as a clear refutation of “intelligent design,” a doctrine which argues that complex features, such as the human eye or the blood clotting system, could not have evolved by gradual accumulation of random mutations over time. Such features, proponents say, are irreducibly complex and could only have resulted from the intervention of an intelligent agent, whether God or some unnamed designer.

But Adami, who discussed his research in a recent lecture at AAAS, said computer analogues of living systems show, in a very concrete way, how simple organisms can acquire complex adaptive traits by standard Darwinian mechanisms of mutation and natural selection.

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