Evolution

In his 1859 book "On the Origin of Species" Charles Darwin introduced the now commonly accepted Theory of Evolution.

This proposed that evolution proceeds as a result of two related processes: genetic variation and natural selection.

Genetic variation is the process by which random mutations occur in the genetic code of an organism, resulting in a population of organisms with different traits. It can also be described as "descent with change".

Natural selection is the process by which individuals with advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing those traits on to the next generation. This is also known as "survival of the fittest".

This simple application demonstrates how these two processes interact by evolving a random string of characters into a target phrase. Each time you create a new generation, it creates a new random string of characters containing the same number of characters as the target phrase. This represents genetic variation, or descent with change.

The target phrase represents the individual's ideal genetic makeup: the one that best suits it to its environment. Whenever a character in the random string matches the character in the same position in the target phrase, it is copied into the result. This represents "survival of the fittest", or the tendency for the individuals that are best adapted to their environment to survive and reproduce.

Over many generations, the result string evolves to match the ideal, target phrase.