Experimental studies of evolution have increased greatly in number in recent years, stimulated
by the growing power of genomic tools. However, organismal fitness remains the ultimate …

Mutations are the ultimate source of heritable variation for evolution. Understanding how
mutation rates themselves evolve is thus essential for quantitatively understanding many …

In order to characterize the dynamics of adaptation, it is important to be able to quantify how
a population’s mean fitness changes over time. Such measurements are especially …

Many populations live in environments subject to frequent biotic and abiotic changes.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to ask whether an evolving population's mean fitness can increase …

Building more open-ended evolutionary systems can simultaneously advance our understanding
of biology, artificial life, and evolutionary computation. In order to do so, however, we …

Genetic spaces are often described in terms of fitness landscapes or genotype-to-phenotype
maps, where each genetic sequence is associated with phenotypic properties and linked to …

The Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) has followed twelve populations of Escherichia
coli as they have adapted to a simple laboratory environment for more than 35 years and …

Genetic spaces are often described in terms of fitness landscapes or genotype-to- phenotype
maps, where each potential genetic sequence is associated with a set of properties and …

We present an inquiry-based curriculum based on the digital evolution platform Avida-ED (
http://avida-ed.msu.edu ). We designed an instructional sequence and lab book consisting of …

Gene duplications have been shown to promote evolvability in biology and in computational
systems. We use digital evolution to explore why; that is, what characteristics of gene …