Real Life Replication

I've been reading a fascinating book called the Blind Watchmaker written by Richard Dawkins. The book is about an argument for the theory of evolution. In the book he uses a very interesting method of demonstrating the cumulative effects of evolution. In the computer program he begins with a very simple organism (or as he refers to them, biomorph) and assigns it default gene values. He then creates a method called evolution. The purpose of this method is to alter the value of one of the genes by +/- 1 with each method call. Comparing the effects of say 5 biomorphs some number of calls >>0 we can see that the effects of this method produces very different results on each of the organisms. I cannot go into too much detail (mostly because I still havn't finished the read) but I found this a very interesting use of some basic tools found in almost any programming language.