Michael Conrad (biologist)
Michael Earl Conrad was an American theoretical biologist. He was a professor of computer science at Wayne State University. His book Adaptability has been very influential in theoretical biology.
Conrad was the first to publish theory on the evolution of evolvability, beginning in 1972, with the idea that mutations which smoothed the adaptive landscape would increase the chance that other adaptive mutations could be continually produced, and would thereby hitchhike along with those mutations, thus "bootstrapping the adaptive landscape" to produce the "self-facilitation of evolution".
