The MSU Digital Evolution Laboratory was founded at Michigan State University in 1999 by Drs. Charles Ofria and Richard Lenski, born out of the Caltech Digital Life Lab (now at the Keck Graduate Institute) and Lenski's own Experimental Evolution Lab. The twin goals of the lab are to experimentally study digital organisms to improve our understanding of how natural evolution works, and then to apply this knowledge to solving computational problems. Over the years since its founding, the Devolab has grown significantly in both number of people and the breadth of their research.
Why Digital? A faster way to study evolution.
Natural organisms take hours to years to produce their next generation of offspring. Studying the evolution of these creatures takes great patience and often requires interpreting information from incomplete data or fossil records. With digital organisms we can produce hundreds to thousands of generations per hour while recording every detail of their evolution.
Avida: Darwinian evolution on a computer
Much of the work in the Devolab is centered on research with and the continued development of the Avida digital evolution research platform. In Avida, a population of self-replicating computer programs is subjected to external pressures (such as mutations and limited resources) and allowed to evolve subject to natural selection. This is not a mere simulation of evolution -- digital organisms in Avida evolve to survive in a complex computational environment and will adapt to perform entirely new traits in ways never expected by the researchers, some of which seem highly creative. Data about each individual is saved to track the fate of the population and analyzed to help answer our many research questions.
Our work was the cover story of the Feb. 2005 issue of Discover magazine. [text, pdf]
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