Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Artificial life, he wrote, is essentially just the inverse of conventional biology. Instead of being an effort to understand life by analysis—dissecting living communities into species, organisms, organs, tissues, cells, organelles, membranes, and finally molecules—artificial life is an effort to understand life by synthesis: putting simple pieces together to generate lifelike behavior in man-made systems. Its credo is that life is not a property of matter per se, but the organization of that matter. Its operating principle is that the laws of life must be laws of dynamical form, independent of the details of a particular carbon-based chemistry that happened to arise here on Earth four billion years ago. Its promise is that by exploring other possible biologies in a new medium—computers and perhaps robots—artificial life researchers can achieve what space scientists have achieved by sending probes to other planets: a new understanding of our own world through a cosmic perspective on what happened on other worlds. "Only when we are able to view life-as-we-know-it in the context of life-as-it-could-be will we really understand the nature of the beast," Langton declared.