There's an acceleration that I'm building into the game which makes evolution happen fast enough that players will not have to be as patient as the mythological Creator had to be with biological evolution. It's even kind of quantum mechanical, if you're willing to stay at the metaphor level.

You start frozen in space and time, and when you go into evolve-mode, the competition begins. It's a battle of fitness between a population of ghost clones, each of which has experienced a mutation in its movement genes.

In the screenshot below you can see the beginning of this process, with the ghosts emerging from the frozen body.

After a couple of seconds, the ghosts have been following their genes and executing a series of muscle contractions, and you can see the rising diversity of outcomes as time goes on. When a photon departs from its source it travels on all possible paths to its destination, so this is a humble reflection of that.

The body in the foreground is a frozen body which is so far the fittest, or the most successful in reaching the goal, as represented by the series of red arrows above.

The third screenshot here shows the situation very near the end of the lifetime of this one short "generation", and if you look carefully you can see that there is at least one ghost which looks like it might overtake the current winner and claim this new position for itself.

What isn't shown is the fact that the ghosts make up only half the population of competitors.

The best performing half of the population is not visible, except for the current record holder shown in the foreground of these screenshots. They are invisible, but they represent a good number of runners-up for the leading position and are therefore kept as potential parents of the next generation. The interesting thing is that these others may have better ideas for how to proceed than the current record holder.

After each generation, half the population is discarded, and then all the new replacements are mutations of the (mostly invisible) top half of the population.