Here's a recent survey / observational science paper by some prominent "neuroevolution" / A-Life researchers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453. I found this refreshing because it's rare that science papers talk about the debugging and experimental process and debugging journeys underlying this research.
Ken Stanley and Risto Miikkulainen original NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) paper: http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/stanley.ec02.pdf
Ken Stanley's novelty search page, and a link to his book, "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective": http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/noveltysearch/userspage/
Risto Miikkulainen's Evolving Deep Neural Networks paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00548
Ken Stanley & team's work at Uber, with links to some recent papers: https://eng.uber.com/deep-neuroevolution/