This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third European Conference on Artificial Evolution, AE '97, held in Nimes, France, in October 1997. The volume presents 22 revised full papers carefully selected for inclusion together with an invited survey on the state-of-the-art in scatter search by Fred Glover. The papers are organized in topical sections on genetic-algorithm operators, applications in various areas, theoretical issues, methodologies, and evolvable hardware and robotics.