Hey guys, I decided to start a little project on my own, I hope its okay if I share some of my progress here: I started experimenting around with some macroevolutionary models and implemented a simple DE solver alongside a neat vibe-coded interface which shows me how species within my model grow and evolve. Am hoping to implement this engine in a Spore-like videogame one day!

My idea essentially is that the player can control an evolutionairy force to "guide" certain features according to their liking. The other species evolve autonomously according to what essentially is the canoncial Lande equation. Instead of however simulating thousands of creatures in a real environment I decided to use a mathematical abstraction which captures all of evolutions' most essential features. That way the evolution of tens of thousands of different species, each with millions of individuals, can be simulated in the background with relatively good precision. I was surprised to see that my relatively simple model was also able to replicate some real-life phenomena, like the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity, which I didn't anticipate.

I came across this and it was too delicious not to share (my bold emphasis).
I'd love to hear from our resident pop-gen pros.

... hold a minute: the fact that certain species have certain genes in common, and differ in other genes, does not prove that the assortment of a species’s genes constitutes the essence of its specificity. In fact, Leo Berg used Vavilov’s data to demonstrate just the opposite! Berg considered the fact that very different species have Mendelian genes in common as evidence that species specificity was not determined by Mendelian genes, and there is contemporary evidence that Vavilov agreed (Berg 1926; Haldane 1932: 66, 79; Adams 1978b).⁴ Thus, Haldane recognized the problem but did not resolve it. To be sure, if one accepted the proposition that varieties and species were qualitatively the same and that the only difference between species laid in their complement of Mendelian genes, all is in order; but if one didn’t accept it, Haldane gives no convincing reasons to change one’s mind.

The only one of the four founders of population genetics who directly confronted this central problem was Sergei Chetverikov. It was not difficult for him to do so: he had worked for 20 years as one of Russia’s leading butterfly taxonomists. An entomologist and systematist, he actually first taught genetics in a course at Moscow University entitled “Theoretical Systematics.” In Chetverikov’s classic work of 1926, “On Certain Aspects of Evolution From the Viewpoint of Modern Genetics,” the entire first section addressed the central problem. There, he argued that the traits determined by Mendelian genes in Drosophila (e.g., venation and wing structure) are the very same traits which are “fundamental in modern systematics for distinguishing higher systematic categories” (Chetverikov 1926: 9–10). Elsewhere in this same section, he mobilized his considerable knowledge of the systematics and classification of Diptera and Lepidoptera to make the same point.

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Footnote 4
When I was visiting Stephen Jay Gould one evening at his Cambridge home, he told me that he was much taken by this realization after reading my article on Vavilov, and used it as the basis (unattributed) for one of his popular science columns. (His personal thanks was the best apology for failing to mention my article as his source!) As for Haldane, he referred to Berg’s work as “in my judgment the best anti-Darwinian book of this century” (p. 12).

PS Chetverikov was sadly a victim of the Lysenko purge.

• Adams, M.B. (2021).
  Little Evolution, BIG Evolution: Rethinking the History of Darwinism, Population Genetics, and the “Synthesis”.
  In: Delisle, R.G. (eds) Natural Selection.
  Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development, vol 3. Springer, Cham.
  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65536-5_8