Hi.  I'm a newcomer to the Evolution program.    I am a biology teacher, and I've been exploring the program with students.  It's really powerful and interesting.  Thanks for creating such a great interface!

My question is about how to interpret the progress of the program. 

Once a creature is evolving, you can track its progress with different metrics, such as the fitness score, or its proficiency at a particular task, such as the horizontal distance is has moved from the start (for the running task). 

Is there a difference between these two metrics, fitness and proficiency?  

I ask because the fitness and the task proficiency appear at first glance to be roughly but not perfectly correlated--I might be wrong, maybe they are actually perfectly correlated. 

Is the task performance an absolute measurement, for example, how far the "farthest" joint reached, while the fitness is an average of all the joints/bones/muscles for a particular creature?

Or does fitness measure something else?

In biology "fitness" has a specific meaning related to the contribution of genetic material to the next generation, i.e., to simplify, how many offspring an organism has, and not necessarily how fast it can run, how high it can jump, and so on.  

Is the fitness score in the computer program somehow related to reproduction? 

If the fitness score is not related to reproduction, and the creators would like to make the program as biologically accurate as possible, would it make sense to change the word "fitness" to something else, such as "performance?"

OK, thanks again,

Bruno