God damn you Binro!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOHT_dTDQbQ

(five stars for a good video nonetheless)

I think potholer should have stuck to one model and fleshed it out. I like the blocks.
• sequences can copy themselves. some are more likely to than others
• individual copies don't last forever, but the pattern lives on through copies
• there is a finite number of blocks for making copies with, so the speed and accuracy of copying matters
• the sequence itself determines the copying ability
• self-copying sequences appear naturally given blocks, energy, and time
• block world is old enough that this is almost guaranteed to happen at some point in hits history

But what's really interesting is not the cause of natural selection, it's the effects. Consider that the "natural environment" of particular gene is a complete organism, and only that organism can live, die, and reproduce. When that happens, it happens to *all* of its genes. That makes modeling the system as a whole difficult. But it provides a nice framework for explaining things like why sickle-cell disease isn't selected against why most of our genes don't do anything.

There are nice computer models of evolution around, like cdk007's "evolution is a blind watchmaker" and Dawkins' weasel.

tldr: evolution is cool as shit

I love this guy, but he's starting to get repetitive. Repetition will not help him, as AronRa showed. No matter what you say or how many times you say it, they will just pull out a pistol and shoot their own raft.