Really interesting topic. For about 5 years, I spent much of my hobby time writing a-life sims and messing with them. I wanted an "aquarium" that looked interesting that I could have running 24/7, constantly evolving. I guess I wrote maybe 10 sims from scratch in Unity, Java, Processing, and p5.js.
I have had (limited) success in getting emergent control and coordination behaviours. A couple examples:
I played with a "battleground" simulation, inspired by the "Gladiabots" game, where the entities were NN-based fighting robots organised in teams (4v4, 20v20 etc). Random sensor systems, random fire control systems, signal emitters, etc, hooked up to random neural nets where winning teams procreate and evolve/mutate. Over a LOT of generations (maybe like 20,000+), I'd see teams evolve what looked like coherent tactics, including teamwork, role specialisation, and time-based tactics/formations.
I had a "jellyfish" simulation, similar premise, with small aquatic animals of various "species" who could speciate, etc. The aquarium had qualities like light levels, food production, temperature zones, etc. You always have to be careful to not anthropomorphize too much, but I would clearly see battlegrounds develop and evolve, and successful species rise and fall with behaviours that (again over many thousands of generations) initially look like drunken sailors but evolve into what looks like basic behvaiours, at least at the level you may see in small multicellular organisms.
In my experience, getting emergent behaviours needs a difficult-to-optimize balance between system complexity and system stability. Every neuron, sensor, output, or attribute you add to the sim can cause a super-exponential growth in the "problem space" of your denizens. Behaviours that require any form of coordination take so much longer to evolve than uncoordinated behaviours because you tend to need to "get lucky" where both a signal and response evolve/mutate at the same time.
Another issue is that feed-forward networks are not great at temporal processing. Many basic behaviours require more temporal processing than I expected when I started building these things. I got these to evolve by having features like memory nodes, timer nodes, and recurrent nodes, but if I were to build another one, I'd experiment more with LSTM-like neurons and other recurrent/memory-based architectures.
In my experience (and with my horrendously under-optimised codebases), the amount of evolution you need to simulate is super-exponential as you grow the complexity of the sensors, outputs, and neural nets. In my playing around, doubling any single dimension almost always led to more than a 4x increase in the time you need to see new emergence. In my most complex sim, it got to the point where even tweaking a basic variable like temperature or day/night cycle would need me to run the sim for at least a day to properly observe the impact, and sometimes more like a week or two. I never really knew when the "evolution ceiling" was hit, which was part of the fun for me -- I love seeing a new behavior suddenly appear.
This ALIEN project is really interesting and it has a lot of cool ideas. I haven't played with it yet but I think it's going to be fun! The project I have been keeping an eye on is Neuraquarium, which has similar design goals to what I have built in the past.
Well yeah, it's big numbers! These sims (at least the ones I did) can never be compared to earth, because they make assumptions that start from maybe billions of years of simulated time, and then further make tons of ridiculous assumptions about life based on our observations from this one planet, and then they massively compress our physical reality from atomic and sub-atomic interactions to insanely granular abstractions in these sims.
("How much energy would it take to 100% accurately simulate our universe from the big bang to now" is a pretty interesting thought experiment though!)
I like that interesting period on Earth from maybe 4 billion years ago to maybe 500 million years ago, where we went from amoebas learning to duel to arthropods learning advanced dueling techniques. So any given one of my sims assumes a minimum of 10 billion years of priors, and assumes that it can compress millions and millions of generations and population diversity into a much smaller number.
I've had single sims where basic building blocks go from drunken amoeba to the earliest of pretty intelligent arthropods - so that's 3.5b years of evolution. But all sims are a massive tradeoff between fidelity and duration (fast/good/cheap), and the sims I like the most are the ones that cover an era that creates emergence in even a single aspect of the simulation. I guess most of what I'm interested in simulating is vaguely on the order of 100m years of evolution, over vaguely 7 days of real-time simulation?
I wonder if we could develop any kind of rigor around knowing what certain systems are capable of, or at least some kind of framework for testing things out and being able to catalog and compare them.
I believe the sims need to tend towards less assumptions, more primordial soup, and more running time. We only have one reference point (billions of years of basic shit swirling around) and I feel like we need to start closer to that rather than skipping a bunch of stuff because it's too hard. Making things with so much baked in structure/assumptions doesn't seem to be providing the learning that we need. (I'm speaking in a very general sense, I don't mean this to come off as personal about you or your projects, they sound cool!)
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree.
Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
The thing with taxonomies is that trying to make a category more precise tends to exclude things you want to include in it, and vice-versa. It is especially easy to find examples of this in nature, because nature has existed since long before humans had opinions about how things should be organized.
What is a cat? It's a small furry quadruped in family Felidae.
- Exception: cats may be quite large (lions, tigers).
- Exception: cats may have no fur (sphinx cats).
- Exception: cats may have fewer than four legs (e.g. due to injury).
Even questions that seem like they should be quite easy to settle, like "are these two gulls of the same or different species?", might be impossible to define formally due to things like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species>.
With the specific example of "no such thing as a tree", the category of plants that humans call "trees" isn't a genetically coherent group. Lots of different types of plants have woody stems and bark and leaves, and you can't group together all the things humans call trees without also including things that we definitely don't.
I definitely understand that the majority of taxonomies are problematic for the reasons you cited. When OP said "no such thing as a tree", I thought OP meant a taxonomic tree, not a literal plant tree, hence my example of binary numbers! Thanks for clarifying.
That said, taxonomic groupings can have both wide consensus and be useful, can't they? (Hand on chin... monotremes? hominids??)
The CS specific analogy might be, "Abstractions are leaky," or more broadly the, "map is not the territory."
Any complex-phenomena that is modeled with with a simplification will have places where that simplification fails. But models can still be highly useful, you just need to choose an appropriate level of abstraction, accept and manage any tradeoffs with exceptions, and move to better paradigm if one emerges.
Although if you want to get get technical, even evolutionary relationships are only trees if you throw out some of the information that doesn't fit the tree. It's truer to speak of phylogenetic networks that can take into account things such as horizontal transfer of genes and recombination.
I've pondered the "taxonomies as trees" as insufficient and broken. What I arrived at as "maybe this will work" is taxonomy as a high-dimensional sponge, where a thing may rest at a given point in high dimensional space (where the dimensions are characteristics of that thing) and may or may not be clustered with other things on certain axes.
Sort of like how word/semantic clustering works in LLMs.
This obviously isn't a fully formed idea, but it might make creating taxonomies easier? Taxonomic clusters? Something like that.
The idea is that our taxonomy selects a group named "trees", but there's little internal coherence in that group, which probably results in more online hilly wars in the plant-loving communities than we the laypeople can think of.
I don't think this article is referring to physical organisms known as trees (as your article does). It's talking about abstract tree structures, in particular:
1. There is a coherent parent-child relationship
2. Children have only one parent
3. Children have no lateral relationships with other children
4. Relationships are mediated through parents, not e.g. grandparent-child directly.
5. We can coherently differentiate between different children
etc.
All of these are assumptions that greatly simplify analysis and therefore useful in any situations, but almost always fail in some way on closer inspection.
More generally we go to the saying "all models are wrong, some are useful."
I'm 95% sure that the author (who is on HN[1]) is at least referring to the article "There's No Such Thing As A Tree" in his line "There is no such thing as a tree." - regardless of the fact that the article as a whole isn't about trees made of wood.
It's possible that he's additionally making a double entendre about abstract tree structures.
What exactly do you mean by "our taxonomy". There's no plant order, family, or genus called trees. It's just a common plant form. Do you just mean some people's personal mental model?
I spent some time working on replacing the formulation of descent as a tree of species with a chain-complete partial order of organisms. Then you start trying to define things like "species" or "strain" or "genus" on that and realize that they don't correspond to any typical clumping of graphs.
Someone else already linked to ring species. In microbiology, the definition of species is "stop asking, we agreed to stop fighting about that, no, really, la-la-la-la." Horizontal gene transfer between species is ubiquitous.
In the end I started talking about populations occupying a niche in a specific place at a specific time, and very cautiously tracing properties among linkages of those. But I'm also the one who kept insisting to my labmates that a gene is not a locus of DNA.
The theory of evolution requires large and fundamental changes in organisms over time due to natural selection over diverse populations with characteristics being passed on by reproduction. Such that very different organisms can have common reproductive ancestors.
It does not in fact require a specific number of clearly delineated categories of organisms where all individual organisms are in one and only one category.
That part is a human invention to try to make sense of the world, rather than part of the mechanics of the world itself. The categorization is probably a necessary invention to try to make sense of the world in a scientific systematic way, and is also inevitably a broken inconsistent subjective biased over-simplified map of the territory.
I have a couple of sources that agree with the proposition that taxonomies are broken, linked below. The short summary is that they can be useful, but they are always just models of the real world. As such, they will always be broken in some way. Even the example of number is incomplete. Is infinity odd, even, or something else?
Taxonomy is just bureaucracy, evolution is real and breaks taxonomy, because evolution works on the level of individuals and genes, when taxonomy works on leaky abstractions called species and groups of species.
This would be incompatible only if we require realistic interpretation of our taxonomies and theory of evolution can be true regardless of our (anti)realistic commitments.
> If so, wouldn’t it be incompatible with the theory of evolution?
It would be incompatible with viewing some past views of the mechanisms of evolution as complete; the “theory of evolution” beyond broad outline is something of a moving target that accommodates things like the ways in which taxonomies are approximate abstractions that aid in discussion rather than exact descriptions of reality.
What is the difference between a biological mutation and a new species? There are thousands of years of grey area between the two. The Theory of Evolution is a tree-like model to summarize billions of years of biological mutations into neat little branches, but we essentially have to ignore the vast periods of grey area in order to turn that into a tree.
Convergent evolution doesn't make evolution non-tree-like, that's just a tree with similar-looking branches or leaves at different locations. Pretty standard really. Convergent evolution makes taxonomy less tree-like.
Carcinization is a good example: it makes lots of things crab-like, so from a surface taxonomic point of view a flattop crab, a coconut crab, and marbled crab are all pretty crabby. But they're completely different evolutionary lineages, and only one of them is a "true crab".
> Convergent evolution makes taxonomy less tree-like.
Yes, exactly. "All taxonomies are don't broken" is not at all "incompatible with the theory of evolution," is the point. The taxonomic layer is pasted on top.
Sorry, as stated above I misunderstood "There is no such thing as a tree." to mean that OP though taxonomic trees were fundamentally broken in some way, I misunderstood OP!
That said, if we had perfect knowledge of the speciation process over the years, would our taxonomy not be extremely close to a perfect tree, where every node has 2+ branches, and branches don't converge to being species-compatible for breeding?
I get convergent evolution, but among large (let's say 10g+) organisms, I'm not aware of convergent evolution resulting in compatible species that would not otherwise have been compatible?
I'm super rusty on this topic, but if there is theory that large organism actual DNA-level speciation (resulting in individuals who cannot reproduce together) has eventuated to convergence back to a new species (who can reproduce together), I'd love a source. I definitely could have very rusty knowledge on this but it seems intuitive to me?
> If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution?
It's very much not. The thing is that every model is a lie, but they can often be very useful lies. The reason we use taxonomic trees is because they're "good enough" but there are tons of places where this really breaks down.
For example, horizontal gene transfer is a huge problem in microorganisms. If you take a soil fungi from one environment and put it in a completely new one it'll become so stressed out that it somehow increases it's rate of HGT and can borrow genes from completely different clades of life like bacteria or algae. HGT actually happens at more macro scales as well. Many of our GMOs take genes from bacteria and put them into plants. Parasitic plants like dodders are known for taking (and spreading) genes from the wide variety of plants it can parasitize (though this might be the wrong word to use given that we now know it plays a host of beneficial ecological roles to its hosts like acting as an above-ground myccorhizal network allowing plants to "talk" to each other). We also know that HGT is quite common across completely unrelated fish and sometimes we even have certain animals, like the hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin), that push scientists to completely reevaluate their "tree of life" assumptions[0] (aside: this one's particularly bizarre because it even looks like a medieval depiction of a hybrid beast that took different parts of different animals and mashed them together).
Another more obvious problem is just simple hybridization. It can happen across species with regularity (especially in some plant families), but over the deep history of time much larger jumps seem less "rare". On the micro scale it happens so often that "species" is rarely a useful category. Both botany and microbiology often refer to "species complex" instead
Additionally, it's not really clear what an "organism" often is. For example, lichen are actually a partnership between algae and fungi but are given their own species name. Neither of the two can live without each other. And actually we're finding that it's basically a whole ecosystem of many different algae and a fungi. That might not seem as complex but consider that millions of years ago a germ ate another germ and that eaten germ continued to live and reproduce inside it and eventually came to be known as "mitochondria" and form the basis of basically all animals and plants. To this day they have their own DNA but their reproduction is completely tied to us. Also consider the fact that a human is actually mostly germs. Germs outnumber the number of cells in your body (well this can vary based on antibiotic treatments or how long since your last shit). These complex ecosystems that play critical roles in our skin, eyes, guts, and even brains are necessary to our survival. We wouldn't be able to EAT without them! Lastly, take the example of the man o' war. Similar to lichen, it seems at some point ~13 or so different animals came together and worked together so strongly that they essentially merged and became a single organism. Some of the parts of a man o war can even survive without the rest of the "colony" for a short while (imagine if your kidney could just do it's own thing). But, like lichen, it gets its own species name
As you can see there's a number of flaws in the "tree" view of evolution. It works well enough for most cases and that's why we still use it. But try looking up the debates around a taxonomy of human languages. In theory the same approaches should be able to be applied and the same problems (cultural equivalents of "HGT", "hybridization", and blurry lines between "symbiosis and dependency") can apply.
I get convergent evolution, but among large (let's say 10g+) organisms, I'm not aware of convergent evolution resulting in compatible species (with fertile offsping) that would not otherwise have been compatible?
I'm super rusty on this topic, but if there is theory that large organism actual DNA-level speciation (resulting in individuals who cannot reproduce together) has eventuated to convergence back to a new species (who can reproduce together with fertile offspring), I'd love a source. I definitely could have very rusty knowledge on this but it seems intuitive to me?
I never once mentioned convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is irrelevant in modern phylogeny-based taxonomy. I'm talking about the actual genes themselves
Why not both? The modern dismantling of antitrust regulation and enforcement is a significant driver of both. It's gotten way worse now than ever, to the point where private equity firms like Vanguard and Blackrock can be the biggest shareholders in direct duopoly competitors (KO and PEP are an example), or where investors and producers are permitted to fully horizontally and vertically integrate (AMZN is an example). And media (among many other industries) has been permitted to consolidate to ridiculous levels that would have been unimaginable to the architects of early-mid 20th century antitrust laws even on a practical level -- an Amazon-level entity would have been literally impossible to envision in the early 20th century because companies just practically couldn't get that big with manual technologies.
The largest US company in 1929 had revenues of about $1.5bn - roughly $30bn in 2023 dollars, which wouldn't even put it in the Fortune 100 today. Walmart today has revenues of about $600bn, which is roughly equivalent to 6x the top 50 companies in the US in 1929 combined!
It's mind-blowing to me that economics is still using these ridiculously old, flawed models whose assumptions are less true than ever. To me, econ 101 should be teaching how irrational consumers and lawmakers are, what state capture is, monopoly-seeking behaviours as the primary modern driver of profit growth, etc...
Econ 101 is using those models for the same reason Phys 101 uses Newtonian mechanics in a vacuum with rigid bodies of low mass and no charge and with all collisions being elastic.
They are a good enough approximation to reality in a lot of useful situations, and understanding them does help in later classes when they bring in relativity, electromagnetism, fluids, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, bodies that aren't rigid, and so on.
Even after you've got all that stuff under your belt the Phys 101 stuff remains useful, because often something that cannot be modeled accurately enough with just Phys 101 material can be modeled accurately enough if you take the Phys 101 model and tweak it a bit with the rest.
When I took Econ 101 it was very much lectured into me that these models are all based on a bunch of assumptions.
The thing I ultimately found pretty amusing that nearly every model had perfect information, many buyers, many sellers as part of the assumptions and almost every time I see somebody citing Econ 101 either 2 or 3 of the assumptions aren't there.
> The largest US company in 1929 had revenues of about $1.5bn - roughly $30bn in 2023 dollars, which wouldn't even put it in the Fortune 100 today. Walmart today has revenues of about $600bn, which is roughly equivalent to 6x the top 50 companies in the US in 1929 combined!
US real gdp is 10x what is was in 1947 [0] (FRED only goes back to 1947). Add in the extra 18 years and the fact a bunch of companies are now global thus expanding their markets and those revenue numbers don't look so surprising.
Also, why'd you pick the start of the great depression as your start date?
You cited Amazon's vertical integration as a reason they need to be broken up, however Amazon retail's margins vary between 0 and 5%. Walmart on the other hand is more like 25%.
Amazon is the best middle man that customers could ever want. They clip the ticket an almost imperceptible amount.
The stores you'd probably promote, small mom and pop stores, generally have 50%+ margins.
Who exactly is gouging customers? It's not Amazon retail.
> The stores you'd probably promote, small mom and pop stores, generally have 50%+ margins.
Let's assume this is true, along with your other margin numbers (I honestly have no idea one way or the other offhand).
Where does that money go?
It goes to Mom & Pop buying stuff at other stores in the area.
It goes to improving the small store (by paying contractors, vendors, and other people in the area).
It goes to Mom & Pop improving their house (by paying contractors in the area).
In short, it goes back into the community.
Where does Walmart's 25% go? At best, Bentonville, Arkansas. At worst the Waltons' offshore accounts.
Where does Amazon's 5% go? It gently gilds the top of Jeff Bezos' staggeringly and increasingly titanic fortune.
High margins, on their own, are not a bad thing that we should automatically seek to squash. They are one datapoint among many, and must be taken in context.
I feel we are entering seriously dangerous territory when someone is defending monopolistic practices because during the time of a monopoly consolidating itself the customers get a brief period of lowered prices that the monopolistic forces use to undercut all competitors.
Monopolistic practices is the term I used, exactly to not call Amazon a monopoly because they are not one yet. They are engaging in monopolistic practices though (price dumping causing stifled competition, etc.).
First, that's gross profit, which doesn't include the cost of paying the employees that work in the store, or the cost of paying "mom and pop" for the work they put in, or the cost for rent, electricity, heating, garbage collection, insurance, etc.
Second, judging by what little I can see without paid access, the "50% gross margin" refers to "health and beauty care products", not to all products sold by small shops in general.
As a middle-aged long-time smoker who quit smoking immediately upon buying a vape several years ago, and having quite a number of friends who did the same thing, I'll point out a number of issues I have with this measure.
- I do see a lot of kids vaping, just like you used to see a lot of underage kids smoking or drinking. The solution there was not to ban cigarettes and alcohol for adults, or require a prescription, it was suitable age-appropriate regulation.
- I would not have seen a doctor to try out vapes. Under this regime, adult vapers like myself will now have to see a doctor, get a prescription which will likely need re-prescribing every 1-3 months, and most doctors won't renew prescriptions over the phone or without charge. My local GP charges me $80 a visit, that's now adding potentially $320-$1k/year to the cost of vaping, not to mention the additional fees that will be charged by pharmacists and whoever the approved vendors will be. (I also expect the approved products to kinda suck and certainly not include the only two flavours of vape that I enjoy.)
- This thing about "big tobacco" somehow being the beneficiaries of Australian vaping seems like nonsense to me -- at least where I live (VIC), the overwhelming majority of vapers use dodgy off-brand imports of disposable vapes that are sold over-the-counter, with nicotine, by unethical tobacco shops (extremely common around my area). For more "sophisticated" vapers who use refillables with hand-mixed flavour and nicotine, the nicotine is imported from somewhere like NZ from a reputable nicotine supplier, the flavours are purchased locally, and the devices are mostly from quality Chinese manufacturers. I have seen maybe 1-2 Juul's in the past five years, but I live in regional Australia so maybe things are different in the city. Overall I think big tobacco seems to have a lot more to gain from vape prohibition here, as do the big pharma companies who sell OTC nic replacement products (e.g. J&J and GSK).
- I have yet to see compelling evidence that vaping carries greater risk than other NRT products, modulo the Acetyl Acetate / "popcorn lung" issues that as far as I can tell originated almost entirely from dodgy THC vapes (very different product to nic vapes).
Personally, I think the better solution here would have been to regulate vapes like cigarettes. They are beneficial to long-term adult smokers who have tried and failed to use other methods to quit. My wife literally tried everything including the crazy prescription anti-nic drugs and never was able to fully quit until switching to vapes.
It's clear there is a huge under-enforcement problem right now (e.g. local shops selling OTC nicotine vapes, which is already illegal, and selling them to kids, also already illegal) but giving them the same regulatory framework as cigarettes, or maybe only allowing chemists to dispense them to 18+ users would have been preferable here.
I love my vape and what it did for me and my friends. I don't really plan on quitting vaping any time soon because based on my readings of the mainstream medical papers, there isn't sufficient evidence of personal risk for me that comes even close to other legal risky things I do like eating fast food and drinking wine.
I just dislike being in a position of now either needing to illegally import, or pay a huge effective tax to the medical/pharmacy industry, to keep vaping, as a responsible adult.
That said, I would support a simultaneous "grandfather" ban on both cigarettes and ALL other nicotine products along the lines of cigarette bans where the products are banned for people 18 and younger, and that ban grows by one year per year. That's a better approach than what Australia is doing.
I'm unsurprised it came to this, you could see the media coverage of vaping growing increasingly shrill / moral panicky over the past years, in contrast to the actual science on nicotine harm, where vapes may be on the "bad" side of other NRT products, but nowehere near the harm of cigarettes. It follows an eerily similar media narrative to what I've seen in other western countries (maybe other countries too, but I mainly read English media).
I would not be surprised at all if both big tobacco and big pharma lobbyists are high-fiving themselves over this.
This is a game I made so my friends and I could do something over Zoom on Saturday nights during the lockdown. It's best with Discord or Zoom for chat, but it can also be played solo or without a communication channel for the other players.
Like most of my side projects, the build started to take on a life of its own and has consumed basically all of my non-work waking hours for the past few weeks :)
It's been pretty well-tested under Chrome on Windows, iOS, and Android. There are significant known bugs under Safari and Firefox, those are next on the list.
The FAQ on the home page covers most questions I've heard from new players (you have to be logged out to see it).
It's been played by about 100 of my friends and now I'm starting to open the doors a little wider, hope some fellow film buffs here find it fun!
For my movie recommender project, I wanted to support Letterboxd but they didn't respond to any of my emails (they have a closed API). So for now I only support Trakt. If anyone knows how to get onto the Letterboxd API please let me know!
Awesome! I did a similar thing as my quarantine side project! It's https://couchmoney.tv
Quite a few years ago, I wrote a boardgame recommendation engine for reddit (/r/boardgamerecommender), and when the quarantine hit, I was watching movies and really scraping the bottom of the barrel with the recommendations I was getting (both automated and manual), so I made couchmoney.
I haven't done much with it - have a few hundred users, but I'm planning on keeping it going under the radar because it's transformed how I personally watch movies. I now have close to 200 couchmoney dynamic lists ("1980s Action", "Obscure Horror Comedies" etc) that update every time I watch a movie and are based on real people's tastes.
The engine isn't perfect but it's adapted from the board game thing, which I've been tinkering with for a long time now.
More than happy to help you if you hit issues or want to bounce ideas ... I spend a lot of time thinking about recommendations!
The recommender morphed into my latest quarantine side project, which is a "name that movie" game designed to be played over zoom. It's still super early (and basically only works on Chrome right now) but if you like movies, you may like that. It's at https://couchmoneytrivia.tv
Awesome!
All the reactions motivate me to finish at least a first version of my project, so I'm going to do it and then I'll be glad to share it with you! I'm going to try your trivia game too :)
I have had (limited) success in getting emergent control and coordination behaviours. A couple examples:
I played with a "battleground" simulation, inspired by the "Gladiabots" game, where the entities were NN-based fighting robots organised in teams (4v4, 20v20 etc). Random sensor systems, random fire control systems, signal emitters, etc, hooked up to random neural nets where winning teams procreate and evolve/mutate. Over a LOT of generations (maybe like 20,000+), I'd see teams evolve what looked like coherent tactics, including teamwork, role specialisation, and time-based tactics/formations.
I had a "jellyfish" simulation, similar premise, with small aquatic animals of various "species" who could speciate, etc. The aquarium had qualities like light levels, food production, temperature zones, etc. You always have to be careful to not anthropomorphize too much, but I would clearly see battlegrounds develop and evolve, and successful species rise and fall with behaviours that (again over many thousands of generations) initially look like drunken sailors but evolve into what looks like basic behvaiours, at least at the level you may see in small multicellular organisms.
In my experience, getting emergent behaviours needs a difficult-to-optimize balance between system complexity and system stability. Every neuron, sensor, output, or attribute you add to the sim can cause a super-exponential growth in the "problem space" of your denizens. Behaviours that require any form of coordination take so much longer to evolve than uncoordinated behaviours because you tend to need to "get lucky" where both a signal and response evolve/mutate at the same time.
Another issue is that feed-forward networks are not great at temporal processing. Many basic behaviours require more temporal processing than I expected when I started building these things. I got these to evolve by having features like memory nodes, timer nodes, and recurrent nodes, but if I were to build another one, I'd experiment more with LSTM-like neurons and other recurrent/memory-based architectures.
In my experience (and with my horrendously under-optimised codebases), the amount of evolution you need to simulate is super-exponential as you grow the complexity of the sensors, outputs, and neural nets. In my playing around, doubling any single dimension almost always led to more than a 4x increase in the time you need to see new emergence. In my most complex sim, it got to the point where even tweaking a basic variable like temperature or day/night cycle would need me to run the sim for at least a day to properly observe the impact, and sometimes more like a week or two. I never really knew when the "evolution ceiling" was hit, which was part of the fun for me -- I love seeing a new behavior suddenly appear.
This ALIEN project is really interesting and it has a lot of cool ideas. I haven't played with it yet but I think it's going to be fun! The project I have been keeping an eye on is Neuraquarium, which has similar design goals to what I have built in the past.