A collaboration between two scientists at the Imperial College, London, Dr Bob McCallum and Professor Armand Leroi, DarwinTunes is a musical model of evolution. The creators of DarwinTunes say they want to chart what happens in the process of cultural evolution. 

[Evolution] has also given us the splendours of human culture. This may seem like a bold claim, but it is self-evidently true. People copy cultural artifacts — words, songs, images, ideas — all the time from other people. Copying is imperfect: there is ‘mutation’. Some cultural mutants do better than others: most die but some are immensely successful; they catch on; they become hits. This process, repeated for fifty thousand years, has given us all that we make, say and do; it is the process of ‘cultural evolution’.

Read more about the DarwinTunes project here.