Tsutomu Shimomura, the security expert who tracked down computer hacker Kevin Mitnik, asked Ray at a recent conference whether someone could deliberately re-engineer the Tierra creatures to carry viruses. Ray was not able to reassure Shimomura that this was impossible. But he has set Manor Askenazi of the Santa Fe Institute the task of testing for security weak points. But for evolutionary biologists, security is secondary to the question of whether Tierra will reveal useful information about evolution. Marcus Feldman, a mathematical population biologist at Stanford University in California, remains sceptical.
Evolution is more than a programming problem.
He argues that Tierra does not draw firmly enough on our understanding of evolutionary theory and population genetics. Yet it may be too early for such dismissals. The next five years will begin to show whether the Tierra approach remains an interesting freak show and teaching aid, or whether it will generate new insights into some of the intractable problems of biological evolution, such as the emergence of sex, culture, and complex ecologies.