A closer look
Decades before tech bros started selling algorithmic apes, a brilliant virologist named Nils Aall Barricelli was using the IAS machine at Princeton to casually play God. In 1953, he coded "symbioorganisms" to simulate Darwinian evolution using mere kilobytes of memory. His digital creatures mutated, reproduced, and even developed parasitic relationships, proving that life wasn't just a biological fluke but a mathematical inevitability. Naturally, the scientific community largely ignored him because a computer creating life sounded like a bad sci-fi plot.
