- Stuart Kauffman argues in a Frontiers paper that algorithms lack true agency and open-ended evolution, claiming affordances and novelty cannot be pre-defined algorithmically—participants dismiss this as definitional wordplay.  
- A 34-institution collaboration published “The surprising creativity of digital evolution” (arXiv:1803.03453), cataloging unexpected solutions discovered by evolutionary algorithms and digital organisms.  
- The #hplusroadmap channel surveys open-source artificial-life platforms: Avida (devosoft/avida) is highlighted, while current GPU-accelerated simulators are judged immature; the “Alien” CA project is noted but deemed more art than science.  
- Discussion turns to breeding acceleration: historical egg-production gains came from Oregon’s Dryden bucking eugenics orthodoxy, cross-breeding for output instead of ornamental traits, and the pivotal role of vitamin-D discovery for year-round indoor poultry.  
- USDA data shared: a public spreadsheet lists every licensed animal breeding facility in the U.S.; 21st Century Medicine appears among them, and fish/reptile facilities are exempt.  
- Global animal-production scale is quantified: ~50 billion chicken-years produced annually, ~1 trillion wild fish harvested yearly, plus 1 billion frogs and 1 billion layer hens, framing large-scale biological engineering programs.  
- Links to working memory benchmarks: chimp Ayumu’s digit-span game (mtriad.github.io) and Border Collie Chaser’s 1,000-word vocabulary are cited as comparative cognition datapoints.  
- Lexicase selection, marker-assisted “smart breeding,” and molecular breeding are introduced as precision techniques to compress evolutionary time in both plants and animals.