Marc Kirschner
Harvard University, opened the workshop with a talk on the three basic theories of evolution, emphasizing the role of variation as a source of evolutionary novelty.

Ralf Sommer
Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, discussed how his research shows developmental stability differs between natural isolates.

Sarah Teichmann
University of Cambridge, showed how morphological changes in Metazoa have been driven by variation in regulatory rather than enzymatic and structural genes.

Robert Reenan
Brown University, demonstrated how RNA editing could produce functionally distinct alternative proteins differing from those dictated by the genome.

Frances Arnold
California Institute of Technology , described her laboratory’s work on the directed evolution of cytochrome P450.

James Shapiro
University of Chicago, outlined how the immune system encodes information and responds in well-orchestrated ways to external stimuli.

Lynne Helena Caporale
Columbia University, showed how the genome can harness an impressive array of different pathways to innovation.

Andreas Wagner
University of Zurich, used models of RNA secondary structure to explore the competition between genotype robustness (impeding evolvability) and phenotype robustness (aiding evolvability).

Uri Alon
Weizmann Institute of Science, described a series of genetic algorithm calculations on model systems where switching between modular goals dramatically speeded up the time to find a solution.

Michael Deem
Rice University, employed an NK model of protein evolution to show that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) could, under the influence of a varying environment, lead to the spontaneous evolution of modularity.

Richard Lenski,
Michigan State University and Chris Adami, California Institute of Technology, jointly described their “experiments” with their artificial life system AVIDA.

Günter Wagner and
Jeremy Draghi
Yale University, presented a simple theoretical model in which evolvability increases, on average, despite there being no direct selection for evolvability.

Nigel Goldenfeld
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, presented a theoretical model of pre-Darwinian selection of the genetic code, which emphasized the role of HGT in co-evolutionary mechanisms for code innovation.

Amos Maritan
University of Padua, demonstrated that the free energy landscape of proteins is presculpted by considerations of geometry and symmetry.

Martin Nowak
Harvard University, described how cooperation could evolve in several well-known game theory models.