Unfortunately, most of my material from the era is in storage right now and my knowledge of who said what, where and when is a bit rusty these days (I’m used to just reaching for the book on the shelf to confirm it) … but Steven Levy did a good roundup of work to date in 1992 in his book Artificial Life
… which mightn’t be a bad place to start.
There’s a newer release (2008) with the same title, but I haven’t read it myself — my interests took off in a completely different direction round about the year of publication.
As for the ‘evolve’ aspect, bear in mind that we’re talking about early days work by people who were principally computer scientists with some background in other fields, perhaps … or (more likely) collaborating with experts in the relevant domains, getting information they were able to grossly understand, but far from expert knowledge, and then using it to grossly model effects rather than causes ¹.
So, what they, perhaps hubristically, termed ‘evolution’, you or I might be more inclined to refer to as ‘learning’. But when it comes to populations, rather than individuals, over longer periods of time, perhaps it’s not too wide of the, mark to regard it as evolution of sorts — the alternative is, after all, epigenetic Lamarckism (and I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence of that myself).
I’ll see what I can track down by way of sleuthing backwards from half-recalled information and serendipitous discovery online; it just might take a little while, I’m afraid.
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¹ You know what it’s like: tell a science journalist about Dopamine and the next thing you know, you’ve got people going on ‘Dopamine fasts’ for a month by not responding to Facebook alerts — get hold of the right kind of idiot savant and they’ll tell you the brain is a computer, where you or I would look at a neural net and say it resembled a brain in the same way a plane resembles a bird.
