So anyway, I'm going to talk more about Weelanders.  You may be tired of hearing about my little artificial life forms by now but then, that's your problem.   Today I want to talk more about the (mistaken) belief that much of life is either too perfectly suited to its environment or too complicated to have evolved through random mutation and natural selection.  To illustrate this, I will use Weelander genome i2132 (who I have nicknamed “Bob”), who is one interesting fellow…

Bob's long lost ancestors reproduced sexually, but Bob is an asexual creature.  This is good, because Bob has no legs.  (Yes you heard that right.  Bob has no legs… he can't move.)   You see Bob can't pursue a mate because he can't pursue anything, and thus, unless Bob reproduces asexually, he's screwed (so to speak) and cannot pass on his genetic matter.  In 99.9% of genomes this would be a dreadful setback.  And in all likelihood in all the other genomes this has happened in thus far in Weeland, it has been.  But not Bob.  You see Bob has no legs because they became unimportant to his survival.  To understand why, you have to look at a comparison of the original Basic genome, and Bob's highly evolved one:

The ochre-shaded lines are the ones that have changed.  Note how all the ones that have changed specifically benefit Bob in special ways, and all but one of them have to do with how he eats.  So let's start with that one.

Bob's _AgePerTick is zero.  This doesn't mean that he can't age, since the container class will add 1 to every creature's age regardless, it simply means that Bob has a lifespan twice as long as other creatures.  Which is probably a good thing because he can't move, so it might take a long time for him to find food!

Next, Bob's _BiteCritterPct has gone from 25 to 123.  This is what decides whether (given the option) Bob will bite another creature as opposed to food.  It's a percentage, and given that Bob's chances of biting creatures is 123%, he's probably not the sort of guy you want to run into when you are out for a walk.

Next, _Bites has gone from 3 to 14.  Bob can take almost five times as many bites per tick as other creatures can.  So when a creature wanders by Bob, he almost certainly bites it, and then if after it runs it is still close enough to bite he bites it again, and again, and again.  Bob means business.  But the next mutation is the biggie.

Bob's _EatDistance has gone from 1 to 13.  If your _EatDistance is one, whatever it is you want to bite has to be either 1 or fewer cells away.  Bob can eat food up to 13 cells away.  In other words EVERYTHING Bob sees, he can eat, and he can eat it without moving.  Essentially Bob has big pseudopods that can stretch wayyyyy out and grab the food.  Having gained this mutation, and a predilection for eating creatures, suddenly movement became fairly irrelevant for Bob's progenitor genomes.  And thus, when Bob lost his legs, it really didn't matter.  Everybody else has legs so sooner or later they're going to happen by and be bitten to death and consumed by Bob.

As an added bonus, Bob takes bigger bites than other critters.  He gets 8 food with every bite (_FoodPerBite) instead of 6.

The one other thing that would help Bob is the ability to wait a long time.  He got part of it by setting his _AgePerTick to 0, and the other part by setting his _FoodPerTick to 0.  All creatures use up some of their food every turn just to stay alive.  The container class makes sure they lose 1 food plus their _FoodPerTick gene.  Bob loses the absolute minimum amount of food every turn.

Bob… is a blob.  He hibernates in one spot, until an unfortunate passerby enters his field of vision, and then he gobbles them up rapidly.  Given how long Bob can wait, it's even likely that sooner or later a food dispenser will pop up near him, and he'll eat that too!

Gven these other mutations, Bob just doesn't need legs.  In fact he doesn't need a large section of his genome.  He doesn't need to move to a food source–if he can see it he can eat it, and of course by the same token, he doesn't need to figure out what the best direction to the food source is.  Again, he doesn't care.  Finally he doesn't need code to help him track down and move to a mate.  And wouldn't you know it?  Almost all of this code is missing from Bob's genome.  Because of his unusual mode of survival, losing this code has no effect on Bob's ability to reproduce.  In fact, it helps Bob substantially that it is gone.  Because his genome is so small, he needs very little food to transcribe it, which is the last highly specialized mutation that makes Bob fit so well in his niche: slow to age, needs little food to survive, needs little food to reproduce, eats much more rapidly, can reach out and eat anything he sees without moving, very likely to bite creatures for food, and to boot, gets more food per bite.  And he achieved this only through mutation, and a very long period of evolution.  Go Bob!

Beware the Bob, he eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats, and eats. *pop*

It's not exactly catchy, but it's a winning strategy!  At least until he exhausts the food supply, if that is even possible with the randomly moving and self-refreshing food dispensers. What Bob needs, though, is a large population of dispensers and other creatures.  In a small population, or a food-scarce environment, it's unlikely that Bob would survive.  At the time he evolved, he was perfectly suited to his environment and dominated it until I shut down the simulation at 145,000 ticks (about 9 hours of runtime).