I remember reading something in "The Greatest Show On Earth" by Richard Dawkins about superstitions and how some arise. I think it was something like some pigeons were in a room or some container and were randomly given food. Apparently, some pigeons had been given food while performing various actions or behaviours and began to repeat those actions or behaviours attempting to get more food. I think it would be neat if from totally random events, a couple bizzare behaviours would arise. Suppose a self aware organism civilized or not, is to find a fresh dead body in a certain area. Let's assume this creature is a carnivore, perhaps it will return to this area regularly thinking more food will be there or something, or maybe an organism spots another organism get killed by a falling tree, causing it to avoid walking too close to trees in the future. It would be very difficult to code every possible reaction, but maybe just a few could be coded to add to the randomness of npc behaviours? It may also have a huge impact on natural selection in some populations. What do you think?

This sort of thing is tricky. The thing is, we'd have to be simulating every organism on the planet (or the galaxy) simultaneously in order to make it work well.

A while ago we realised we really couldn't do that without turning the player's computer into a very expensive radiator, so after a lot of discussion over how to do auto-evo, we eventually came up with the solution. But unfortunately I don't think it covers AI. We would need another lot of discussion.

In fact, we probably do need another lot of discussion if that is the case. AI is a pretty important part of evolution and the game itself...