Evolution Lab simulation
Interactive evolution simulator. Creatures with mutating genes for speed, size and sense compete for food while predators hunt them. Watch natural selection, population cycles and evolutionary arms races in real time.
What you’re looking at
Evolution Lab is an agent-based model of natural selection. Each creature has three genes — speed, size and sense range — and every gene has a cost: moving fast and being big burn energy, and sensing far drains a little more. Creatures that gather enough food reproduce, passing on slightly mutated genes. When predators arrive, prey that are faster or bigger than the predators survive more often, and the average genome shifts. No outcome is scripted: some runs evolve small, fast prey; others evolve large, armoured ones.
How to use it
- Watch the population grow; predators arrive automatically after a few generations.
- Tap or click any creature to follow it and see its genes, age, energy and number of offspring.
- Open the panel to see live population and trait charts, release more predators, trigger a famine, or change food and mutation rates.
- Speed up time to watch dozens of generations evolve in a few minutes.
Questions
How does natural selection work in this simulation?
Creatures that find food and avoid predators live long enough to reproduce. Their children inherit their genes with small random mutations. Over generations, genes that help survival in the current environment become more common.
Why do predator and prey numbers rise and fall in cycles?
More prey feed more predators; more predators eat down the prey; then predators starve and prey recover. These are the cycles described by the Lotka–Volterra equations, here emerging from individual behaviour.
Why does every run end differently?
Mutations are random, so different runs discover different strategies — for example small and fast prey that outrun predators, or large prey that predators can't swallow.