Artificial Life, Open-Ended Evolution, and the Origins of Biological Complexity

Charles Ofria discusses how digital organisms in artificial life systems evolve complex traits and behaviors.

Understanding the evolution of complex traits and behaviors has long been a challenge in evolutionary biology. Darwin himself recognized the difficulty of explaining the origins of traits of “extreme perfection and complication” such as the vertebrate eye, but provided profound insights into the process. I will discuss research where we study populations of digital organisms (using some techniques originally pioneered by members of the Santa Fe Institute), examining how they evolve new levels of complexity. I will specifically address issues related to novelty, diversity, ecological effects, and major evolutionary transitions, and discuss how specific environmental conditions affect the accumulation of information that is ultimately used to encode target complex traits. Finally, I will describe some of the steps that we are taking in an attempt to build artificial life systems that are as rich and open-ended as the natural world. Charles Ofria, Michigan State University Colloquium, October 24, 2017