  We use our unified chemical and spectrophotometric evolutionary synthesis
code to describe galaxies of various Hubble types. With stellar evolutionary
tracks and element yields for 5 different metallicities we follow the
spectrophotometric evolution of composite stellar populations and the chemical
evolution of ISM abundances in a chemically consistent way, i.e., accounting
for the increasing initial metallicities of successive generations of stars.
Evolutionary galaxy models are required to give agreement with template nearby
galaxies of various Hubble types in terms of SEDs, stellar absorption indices
or HII region abundances, respectively. Within the framework of a given
cosmological model the redshift evolution of ISM abundances and abundance
ratios is compared to damped Lyman $\alpha$ abundances. This provides
information about the early star formation and nucleosynthesis history of the
absorber galaxies and, at the same time, our models predict their spectral
energy distributions. Optically identified DLA absorbers, with their spectral
and chemical properties, provide, of course, the strongest constraints for the
model parameters.
