Political Amoebas

Does anyone else find it humorous that the latest stunning evidence for evolution, a giant colony of clonal amoebas (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090311131608.htm), chose to take up residence in a cow pasture in Texas, the state that can't seem to decide if it agrees with Charles Darwin yet? So now things are evolving from the microscopic all the way to microprocessors. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a High Performance Computing workshop at Rice University. There I learned that engineers working on the new Petaflop machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory are having to shield the dense cluster of chips from cosmic radiation that could impact its calculations (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-039-s-Chips-to-Save-Mankind-From-the-Cosmic-Rays-Threat-83000.shtml). Wait a minute! Small incremental mutations to an encoding scheme, caused by random cosmic radiation, leading to changes in behaviour? Hey, that supercomputer is trying to evolve! Leave it alone and let's see if it learns to make an amoeba...