Abstract. We investigate the occurrence of two pathological coevolutionary behaviours, specifically disengagement and cycling, in GP systems. An empirical analysis is carried out using constructed GP problems and a historical pursuit and evasion task, the Game of Tag. The effect of semantic bias on the likelihood of pathologies and performance in a coevolutionary context is examined. We present findings correlating semantic locality in the genotype to phenotype map to disengagement and cycling in a minimal competitive coevolutionary algorithm.