On Tuesday, while at the end of my office hours at UT Scarborough campus, I noticed the computer lab workstations I was using had some educational software for biology installed. I fired up the unit on Darwinian evolution. This involved a simulator depicting snails with different shell thicknesses and crabs.
The snails with thinner shells are more easily eaten by the crabs making the thicker-shelled crabs more likely to survive this harsh, harsh digital world. Of course, being the knowledgeable guy that I am, I knew that if shell-thickness is inheritable, in a world full of crabs, successive generations of snails would tend to have thicker and thicker shells until most snails would live in their own private Fort Knoxes. Having previously studied natural selection and evolution, I don’t think this simulation software had too much to teach me about those. What I am more curious about is what affects crab happiness???
