It appears that by 100 000 generations, the 256-circle Darwins are beginning to catch up with the 128-circle Darwins. To see whether the predict that they will eventually ‘overtake’ the 128-circle Darwins, I continued evolution. I took the best 128- and 256-circle images of Darwin (thereby allowing the fittest to survive and reproduce) and allowed evolution to continue for another 900 000 generations (~4 days on my laptop). This generated a couple of pretty decent images, particularly the 256-circle image. You can see the detail of the coat (the start of which can be seen at 100 000 generations), the mouth, the nose, and various wisps of hair.
I’ve worked out how to write images in the SVG file format, so I can create scaleable images with smooth circles. It turns out that SVG very similar to (or maybe a type of) XML, so learning XML has turned out to be quite helpful already. Being able to create SVG images using Python should be very useful in the future. The image is of the SVG version of Darwin evolved using 256 circles over a million generations, showing how much smoother the circles are compared to the PNG images I have been using. I zoomed out to show the surrounding circles, which I think creates a very organic image, whatever that means.