I left Oxford just before the start of the GECCO conference in London in early July. GECCO is the biggest international conference on the subject of artificial evolution and although most of the sessions and talks are about the use of evolutionary algorithms to solve all sorts of problems in engineering, many of the participants are genuinely interested in evolution per se.

One of the milestones of the last GECCO was the public debate on complexity and evolution organised by GECCO in one of London’s most impressive locations, the Natural History Museum. The debate was chaired by Peter Bentley, my former PhD advisor and included some of the biggest names in evolutionary biology and development: Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert. This debate alone would have been a reason good enough to make GECCO an event woth attending. For those of us that could not make it, Peter has created this site in which is possible to download the videocast of the event.