Darwin's Pond

As a former biology major, I enjoyed Darwin's Pond, an artificial life “game” for PCs where you could create different species, tweak their genes and let them swim around in a pond eating bits of food, mating, evolving and (sometimes) dying off. You could even take pond samples and look at your creations under a microscope. To my pleasant surprise, twenty-some years later, the original game is still available (free): http://www.darwinpond.com/

Gene Pool

Darwin's Pond was updated several times and renamed Gene Pool, "a computer simulation where hundreds of virtual organisms evolve swimming skills. These organisms are called "swimbots". You can set mate preference criteria and thus influence what the swimbots consider as attractive qualities in potential mates.”

Six different (incompatible) updates are available here for free download: http://www.swimbots.com/ (iPad, Mac and PC versions). You can even upload any interesting species you create and share them with others. How cool is that?

Wiggle Planet

Jeffrey Ventrella, the genius responsible for this software, has created a new home for these and other experiments is called: http://wiggleplanet.com/. Most of the games here are iOS, but there is one Android app.