Schematic illustration of a digital organism that evolved the ability to perform a logic operation, as reported by MSU researchers in an article in Nature (8 May 2003).
12 populations of E. coli bacteria that are part of a long-term study of evolution in action performed at MSU.
This image, from a recent article in Nature (29 Oct 2009), shows the accumulation of genetic changes (from inner to outer) during 20,000 generations in an E. coli population from a long-term study of evolution in action at MSU.
Studying cooperation and communication among animals such as hyenas may someday allow us to develop software platforms for production of robotic devices that possess the critical perceptual, learning, and information-processing capabilities to allow the robots themselves to cooperate and communicate effectively.
Tree of Life as sketched by Charles Darwin in his notebook around 1837.
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/idea/think.php
A Petri dish showing colonies of E. coli bacteria with a genetic marker that allows MSU researchers to tell ancestral and evolved bacteria apart in competition assays.
MSU students use Avida-ED education software to study evolution in action in populations of digital organisms.
BEACON scientists study the evolution of intelligent behavior using digital organisms and robots.
Applying Evolution in Action
- Computer viruses and immune systems (Dozier, NCA&T)
- Energy management in sensor networks (McKinley, MSU)
- Engineering biopolymers and cells (Ellington, UT)
- Remote ecosystem monitoring (Tan, MSU)
- Automotive structural design (Goodman, MSU)
A virtual petri dish of digital organisms.
Logo for the Avida, a digital evolution system.
Flame graph generated by Avida program. Shows the the number of changes since the original ancestor over time. Different types of organisms may change at different rates.
