The only time I’ve ever come across the analogy is in the hands of creationists (perhaps intentionally) misrepresenting evolution.

Enjoy your holidays!

First thing first – thanks for the effort put into this simulation.

I also have a suggestion to simulate “enviromental selection” rather than artificial selection.

Suppose we want to simulate the evolution of ANY (not predefined) english phrase from random string.

The algorithm will also start with random string of characters (letters+spaces) and generate N children with M% mutations.

Now as “enviromental selection measure” used to select the “surviving” child let us take some statistical measure of likeness of this string to an english phrase. For example, it can be frequency distribution of letters.

Finally, what will be the stopping trigger (i.e., the test that will conclude that current survivng child is some english phrase)? The simplest solution that I can think of now is to perform a Google search on it and check if it returns any results. Of course, successful search does not guarantee that this string is actually an english phrase, but at least that it has some sense (evolved from randomness!), and the more results are returned, the more sure we can be.

I suppose my dusted programming skills would be sufficient to code this thing by myself (excluding, maybe, calls to Google) but I am not sure when and if I can actually do it.

I want to share it anyway, maybe you could add some suggestions or actually place some modified version of it here for our tinkering

While in the popular mind, eternity (or foreverness) often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time. By contrast, infinite temporal existence is then called sempiternity. Something eternal exists outside time; by contrast, something sempiternal exists throughout an infinite time. Sempiternity is also known as everlastingness

Eternal life can also be defined as a timeless existence,[citation needed] which is also not known for certain to be achievable, or even definable, despite millennia of arguments for eternity. Wittgenstein, in a notably non-theological interpretation of eternal life, writes in the Tractatus that, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

Wikipedia

“They do not show a man a palm tree of gold, nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle.”

There seem to be more than enough words in the Greek language for issues like this to happen every so often