Evolution Lab

An interactive, research-informed individual-based evolution simulator. Open Webbots-alpha.html in a modern browser; it has no runtime dependencies.

What evolves

Each organism inherits quantitative traits for speed, body size, sensing, metabolic efficiency, aggression, sociality, behavioral plasticity, thermal preference, fecundity, exploration, and lineage colour. Nearby, energy-rich organisms can reproduce. Their offspring receive recombined parental traits plus bounded mutations.

There is no fixed fitness score. Survival and reproduction emerge from:

• renewable but locally limited resources;
• energetic costs for movement, body size, sensing, and thermal mismatch;
• a spatial temperature gradient and selectable seasonal or warming regimes;
• behavioral thermoregulation that can buffer thermal mismatch at a cost;
• local competition, mating, predation, ageing, and drought disturbance.

The dashboard tracks population, births, deaths, generation depth, resource availability, trait diversity, approximate functional ecotypes, mean thermal lag, and mean plasticity. A drought assay records resistance at the population nadir and time to recover to 90% of the pre-drought baseline. Click an organism to inspect its genome. Experiments are reproducible from a text seed.

Controls

• Space: pause or resume
• F: toggle fullscreen
• Environment: stable gradient, strong seasons, or rapid warming
• Mutation strength and resource renewal can be changed while running
• Trigger drought applies an 18-second resource-growth shock
• Gene-flow pulse introduces ten warm-adapted migrants from a hypothetical source population
• Reset experiment reruns the current seed and settings

Research basis

The model is exploratory rather than predictive. Its mechanisms were selected to reflect active research directions:

• Individual variation in energy-budget parameters can scale into population dynamics: Ecological Modelling (2024)
• Spatially heterogeneous selection can maintain population structure and local adaptation: BMC Ecology and Evolution (2024)
• Mutation can reduce finite-population artefacts in spatial agent-based evolutionary models: Communications Physics (2025)
• Evolution can shift ecological resilience thresholds under stress: Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024)
• Behavioral plasticity can improve persistence while changing the rate of inherited adaptation: Nature Communications (2026)
• Populations can appear to adapt while falling progressively behind a moving environmental optimum: Scientific Reports (2025)
• Climate-associated gene flow can increase survival under warmer, drier conditions, although effects are system-specific: Communications Biology (2025)

The simulator translates these ideas into transparent hypotheses, not fitted biological parameters. A gene-flow pulse is therefore an intervention to test, not a guaranteed rescue, and extinction is retained as an outcome rather than being silently repopulated.

Earlier experiments

Base model.py, beta.py, and 3d-version-beta-in-blenderscript are retained as historical Turtle and Blender prototypes.