Adaptation and reverse evolution in a digital ecosystem

Artificial life simulations represent an opportunity to study adaptation phenomena observed in living organisms. One such phenomenon is reverse evolution, which has been observed in microbes and some sexual populations. This paper shows how populations of digital organisms achieve reverse evolution using a genetic algorithm approach. Patterns of reverse evolution analysed among a number of phenotypic characters provide an insight into the complexity of this evolutionary process. Similarly, this type of approach may assist the modelling of evolutionary processes, whose outcomes would require many years to be tested in a natural environment