Dawkins Biomorphs[chaos]

I really have been led to think differently as a result of creating, and using, computer models of artificial life which, on the face of it, owe more to the imagination than to real biology. The use of artificial life, not as a formal model of real life but as a generator of insight in our understanding of real life, is one that I want to illustrate in this chapter. (Dawkins, 1989, p. p239)

In “The Blind Watchmaker”, Richard Dawkins introduced a simple computer model to illustrate the power of incremental cumulative change. His model mapped a compact digital genome to a branching graphical form. These forms, which Dawkins dubbed Biomorphs, took on a wide range of natural forms and abstract shapes (see Dawkins, 1986, p. p61).