Evolvability in the phylogeny of the ontogenesis of artificial networks of spiking neurons

The culmination of this dissertation is to emulate nature\u27s design strategy in the evolution of neural networks. Specifically it is postulated that in order to capture the effectiveness of this mechanism (and avoid the commonly reported pitfalls or limitations), biologically inspired deviations from the general practice for evolving neural networks must be incorporated into the system. --Abstract, page iii