Summary
This lesson is a good introduction to the use of Evolution Works. Students will learn that to survive in an environment, an organism must be able to reproduce or it will eventually become extinct. The capacity to reproduce is one of the defining characteristics and pre-requisites for life.
Implementation
To Students: This program allows us to create an organism. The organism can eat, move, and reproduce. If the organism goes too long without food, it will die. The organism has three genes that control its behavior. We can design the genes any way we like, which means we can ultimately control the organism's behavior. Let's start off by making an organism that has all of its gene points (150) in searching.
Teacher: Start the simulation. Select grasslands from the scenario menu. Type 150 into the search gene box and zero in the other two gene boxes. Pick a letter to represent the organism, type 1 in the number box, and then hit add. One organism should appear in the world.
First hit the advance key once to show students that the organism moves. Then hit the advance button repeatedly. The organism will move around the world and will eventually die.
To Students: Why did the organism die? What do we need to do to enable it survive? (allow the students to select different numbers for the search and gather genes, but keep the reproduce gene at 0)
Teacher: After the students pick different numbers for the genes, create the suggested organism and start tapping the advance button. Depending on whether the students pick good numbers, the organism will either quickly die or seem to survive for a long time. Once the students create an organism that is good at surviving, start pressing the advance 100 button. Tell them that the button will advance 100 turns in a short period time. No matter how good of organism they pick, it will eventually die if you hit the advance 100 button enough times.
To Students: Why does the organism always die after a certain amount of time? (Because no matter how well adapted the organism is, it will at some point get unlucky and go too many turns without food.) Reproduction is the most basic prerequisite for life. An organism must be able to replicate itself or it will not exist for a long period of time. If you think about all living things, every single one of them has members of its species that reproduce. Now let's try to create an organism that can reproduce.
Teacher: Allow students to distribute the gene points over all three genes. After a few tries, the students should be able to create an organism that surives and reproduces. As you advance, more organisms will populate the world. You can even hit the advance 100 button, or the advance 1k button several times. No matter how many times you hit the button, the organisms will always survive. Congratulations, you have just created a living organism!
Bonus Material
Scientists theorize that very first living organism was a basic molecule that had the capacity to reproduce itself. Scientists recreated these basic molecules in labs by running an electric current through gases that were present on Earth when life began. These basic organisms are called Ribozymes, and are a good example of what the most basic requirement for life is: reproduction.
Links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme