Matt Kielty

looked remarkably like the actual fossil record.

Wait, what is that?

I can share a screen.

Chris showed us these graphs.

Okay, so this is a graph of the actual fossil record.

For the sake of this, just imagine...

tree-of-life sort of evolution image.

And you could see, okay, mollusks, they start here, they die here, and trilobites, they start here, die there.

And then Chris showed us the graphs of these simulations.

You see this one over here?

Oh.

Whoa.

Basically, if you were to zoom in on these branches, you'd see at the end of each of the branches the extinction points of the species.

And the ones from the computer are the exact same as the ones from the fossil record.

Bloops and bleeps are going extinct just like trilobites went extinct, just like ammonites went extinct.

For me, I'm like, wow, yeah, these do look similar, but I'm like, so what?

I think the key here is seeing the resemblance that these randomly simulated groups bear to real groups.

And then remembering that these are just going extinct randomly, whereas we thought these were going extinct through natural selection.

That is wild.

So it's just like computer programming equals life itself.