some ideas for small artificial life prog?

I'm going to work on an artificial life program in LISP.  Text-based, will write the parser-renderer in C later.  I've seen a lot of AL programs; being just grandiose state machines I'm pretty sure writing one would be within my capabilities.

...but I don't want to write a cookie-cutter one either that's just full of animals eating each other and mutating.  I'm not looking to write Spore, but I am seeking some ideas.  What are some concepts that haven't been explored too deeply in AL programs that would be interesting to see attempted?

THIS CONSCIOUSNESS THING THAT MOST PHILOSOPHER TYPES THINK MAKES US SO SPECIAL IS REALLY A VERY EASY THING TO IMPLEMENT IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING.

What is meant by "consciousness" in the above context is "self-consciousness", not in the connotation of being bashful or shy, but being *conscious* (aka knowing) of *the self*. 

A program knows of itself if it maintains data structures that represent itself.  The more elaborate the abstraction, the better quality the self-consciousness of the program.

THREAD OVER.