As weird as that sounds in practice, the idea of doing it in simulation sounds very similar to the idea of "orphanogenesis" in Diaspora. Though most new "people

As weird as that sounds in practice, the idea of doing it in simulation sounds very similar to the idea of "orphanogenesis" in Diaspora. Though most new "people" are formed by mixing the traits of existing individuals, every once in a while the society will create a new person by randomly mixing some traits and keeping track of the resulting genotype. The person so-formed is called an orphan in the book. Awesome hard sci-fi idea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)#Plot_summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)#Plot_summary