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Continuing the thread of other individuals who've done interesting work in this area, I've always been a huge fan of Jeffrey Ventrella's "Gene Pool": http://www.swimbots.com/genepool/

His fractal art is quite compelling as well: http://www.ventrella.com/

Yes, cool dude indeed! Glad you mention him, I was thinking of him when I saw this article. He visited the group where I was doing my PhD many years ago and also gave a fantastic talk on evolution, learning, and artificial life -- I was quite impressed. He has some cool stuff in his website too (http://shinyverse.org/larryy/).

Also relevant is Karl Sims' Evolving Virtual Creatures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8

Not sure how they're connected, but I remember being obsessed with that paper and actually recreating it in 2D as a grad project.