This simulation program lets you explore the evolution of beak size in Darwin's finches on two islands in the galapagos. You can vary five different characteristics of the finches: the initial beak size, the heritability of beak size, the variance in beak sizes, the fitness of different sizes relative to food available, and the clutch size of the birds. You can also vary how much precipitation falls on each island, and the islands size. Each island has its own set of parameters, so you can easily do comparisons between two different parameter sets. For each parameter, the program includes some visual representation, and as you vary the parameter you see visually what you're doing. For instance, when changing initial beak size you see a picture of a finch whose beak grows and shrinks. Each parameter also has some text associated with it that explains the significance of that parameter. When all the parameters are set as you want them, you can run the model for a given number of years and then look at what happened over that time either in table form, or in graphs of population size and beak size. You can also look at the survival rate of birds with different beak sizes for any year of the simulation. The whole simulation runs over the internet in a web browser using the Java programming language.

EvolveIT is one of the nicest of the evolution simulators I've seen. The interface is particularly well designed, and the visual feedback you get as you change parameters is a very elegant innovation that should help students relate the numbers to their meaning. When they were testing it, the only thing missing was a set of exercises for the students to do. Now that its for sale, I believe they include exercises. There is a free trial available on the web, so you can check it out for yourself

Computer: WWW Browser that can run Java(tm) code.

Source: http://biologylab.awlonline.com/

Cost: Low (students), High (site license)

Last update 2nd of February 2000