An interesting thought-experiment to accompany this. Suppose that you are writing a program to create the best creature through evolution. One potential way of

An interesting thought-experiment to accompany this. Suppose that you are writing a program to create the best creature through evolution. One potential way of writing the program is to simply let evolution do its work and have the creatures evolve overtime. The other way is to write the program to simulate mass extinction every few thousand/million generations. This article would suggest that purposely programming in mass extinctions would help speed up the evolution process. This seems counterintuitive given the amount of genetic diversity that a mass extinction would cause. Perhaps the researchers should try doing this and see if the results fall in line with their own.