Ken Stanley came up with the idea of NeuroEvolution while he was a phd student at the Neural Networks lab at UT-Austin.

You can see some of the older NeuroEvolution papers here: http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/project-list.php

I believe Ken Stanley has gone to become a professor at UCF to continue his research: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/