[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RpQ1MsjZJ8[/youtube]
Simulated physics and simulated evolution lead to motile ‘organisms’ in computer code. Videos on the website are beautiful, but it’s unclear how relevant any of this is to real biophysics.
One of the biggest problems with modeling evolution (or thinking about current organisms from an evolutionary perspective) is that it’s unclear exactly where evolution is going. It’s easy to claim that evolution operates through “survival of the fittest”, but if you can’t define “fittest” that doesn’t tell you much.
Many biologists I’ve talked to believe that extreme selection pressure (such as on bacterial populations) produces organisms that are “optimal” – but no one seems to know exactly what is being optimized. A physicist is likely to pick something like energy efficiency (the ratio of power generated to power consumed, which is relatively easy to measure if you’re looking at propulsion), but it seems that many organisms do not operate in an energy-limited regime and are (presumably as a result) not particularly energy efficient.