Can digital organisms teach us anything about biological evolution?

I will introduce the concept of fitness landscapes and highlight the importance of this concept for studies of evolution of organisms. Difficulties related to experimental studies of biological fitness landscapes will be explained and illustrated with a few examples of experimentally derived landscapes. Further, the artificial life models in which digital organisms follow the three basic ingredients of Darwinian evolution ? inheritance, variation and selection - will be discussed. A new method for deriving organism?s fitness from population abundance will be proposed. Since, the talk is based on a research in progress, I will present only very preliminary simulation results and concentrate on posting questions about possible similarities between properties of biological and artificial fitness landscapes.