This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-conference proceedings recording the scientific progress achieved at the First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware, ICES'96, held in Tsukuba, Japan, in October 1996. The volume presents 33 revised full papers including several invited contributions surveying the state of the art in this emerging area of research and development. The volume is divided into topical sections on evolware, cellular systems, engineering applications of evolvable hardware systems, evolutionary robotics, innovative architectures, evolvable systems, evolvable hardware, and genetic programming.