The Evolution of Clocks

The video linked here is awesome. Hat tip to cmeckhardt for the pointer.

This guy throws in gears, ratchets, hands, and springs. He defines ways they can stick together. He "shakes the box" by letting them "reproduce" and by choosing a criterion for which ones die off. He gets clocks. He tweaks the parameters and runs it again, and he gets clocks. Yet again: clocks.

It had occurred to me to try to run some kind of simulation, just to get a feel for that sort of thing myself, but I never thought of running one on clocks. That's simple enough to model, with "stickinesses" analogous to biological components and a fairly simple genomic data structure. I would love to read the code. :-)