Darwin Day: Good Evolution Games?

The problem with evolution-based games is that they don't need players, that's why you don't see many of them (Spore doesn't count, it's not evolution, it's intelligent design).

I do, however, have a favorite evolution game, if we may call it so: Gene Pool. It features a simple 2D water environment with real physics and simple swimming creatures whose phenotypes are basically multi-jointed tree-like structures, where the genotype controls the number of joints / branches and the amplitudes and frequencies of their flapping in relation to creature's sensors.

I consider this to be an ideal evolution game: it has real physics, creatures that must perceive their environment and interact with it through physics in order to reproduce, heredity, variation, and no player input at all - except for placing walls to isolate parts of the environment, which (supposedly, I never tried that) lets you create your own little Australias.

My entire office once spent several days playing with this thing. One guy's creatures evolved into worms that swim by writhing, mine looked like asymmetric shrimps, and the third guy evolved bird-like flappers, also asymmetric. It was amazing to watch randomly flailing creatures evolve into swimmers that actively chase food particles and mates.

Darwin loved backgammon.

You could try to get the metronome synchronization thing to happen--everybody who has a metronome brings one, you put them all on a slightly unstable surface and see if they find a collective beat.

Play telephone in a circle. Each player makes up a message and whispers it to the person on her left, then she whispers what she heard to the player on her left. Keep going until a stable meme evolves.

Science is wonderful, and Darwin was not only brilliant, but was diligent and hardworking and courageous in offering a valid theory in which was bound to subject him to scathing criticism from the obvious sources.

Let's celebrate Darwin, and every other brave and insightful scientist, but I wouldn't celebrate natural selection as such. Natural selection itself is an alien god. As Darwin said:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice.

These aren't really what you are looking for, but I bring them to your attention nevertheless.

Dominant Species (I have not played this but) while it is quite long, it is very highly rated.

Evo

Primordial Soup

Not a game as such, but worth a look: http://www.cambrianexplosion.com/

A dark arts suggestion: stuff the pairs of scale model animals into the ark? The laughs you'll get about the alleged deluge will be much more effective at isolating and ridiculing the creationists out of their ideological trap than any mere example of evidence.

It's only possible to demonstrate evolution in finely tuned environments specifically designed to show it off (like a computer program for example) so I don't think you'll be able to demonstrate it like that. Also Darwins contribution to the theory was minimal at best, he's just used as a figurehead because he wrote down the status quo slightly sooner than anyone else.