Okay so how about this for an idea: You have a game like unatural selection (old dos game) where you place creatures in an evironment and bread and manage them. These creatures have Physical characteristics, like speed, sight, intelligence and anything else you can think of. These creatures have some kind of genetic structure like dna. So that when they breed, there is some kind of gene selection process The resulting offsprings characteristics are defined somehow by its resulting genes. Oh and personality and behaviour also needs to be affected by its genes. This is a completely rough idea that I have been playing around with, so any ideas, comments, suggestions?

Instead of a single "intelligence" quality, why not give each creature a neural net, which itself is evolvable, and which controls the creature's movements (perhaps even directly, as in the ragdoll neural net that I've seen mentioned once or twice on this forum, for instance here and here) - this might allow for some potentially very interesting, perhaps even fascinating evolved behaviour, I would think.

In order to allow the user's manipulation of a creature's intelligence, you might want to try to associate this net with an "intelligence" value or set of values, but I'm not entirely sure how to associate a single "intelligence" value with such a neural net, and a set would restrict its evolution a bit, I suspect, unless you provided a lot of controls or had them only affect the net when explicitly instructed to do so.

All in all it sounds like a very interesting idea - would one control the creatures directly, or indirectly by manipulating their evolution? What sort of game would it be? I think that one could apply the idea in some way to a number of genres, with some degree of work... simulation and strategy seem to me to be the most obvious, but I would imagine that one could create some sort of RPG, action, fighting game or even an adventure game perhaps, with enough thought.

Have you ever seen the game Creatures? Very similar to what you're talking about.

http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/creatures_index.php

The book Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand (the creator of Creatures) gives some good details on how all this was done.

http://www.amazon.com/Creation-Life-Make-Steve-Grand/dp/0674011139/sr=8-1/qid=1163282055/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-8860638-9179216?ie=UTF8&s=books

Likewise, have you seen the games SimLife or Spore?

The idea is certainly not original. That said, it's still interesting, it it could probably go new places. I've actually started a long-term project which would create a similar sort of game for an educational setting. It would go from the simple ("squash all the bugs that move too slow, and you'll eventually end up with a species of very fast moving bugs!") to the more complex (like you are describing, probably with ANNs). Feel free to PM if you want to bash around ideas.