A researcher has created the first self-replicating mathematical organization, a demonstration of how astounding complexity can arise from simple beginnings and processes, possibly an echo of life's origins.

Using a real-life virus as a model, researchers have built a virtual version using more than a million digital atoms. Scientists have previously simulated small pieces of living cells, but researchers say this is the first digital simulation of an entire life form.

Computer programs designed to 'evolve' solutions to mathematical problems support the idea that complexity in nature emerges in small, often apparently unremarkable, steps. Complex biological organisms are thought to develop through a series of intermediary evolutionary adaptations, rather than in single giant evolutionary leaps.

The evolutionary path from simple microbe to complex forms, on Earth or anywhere in the universe, is long, gradual and very Darwinian, according to a new experiment conducted with an "alien form of life" in a virtual petri dish.

The New York Times interviews Steve Grand, the creator of the Artificial Life simulation 'Creatures', about his current work to to build a robot that thinks, feels and learns.

Steve Grand, designer of the artificial life program Creatures, talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be "alive."

Scientists have built a virtual world inside a computer and filled it with \"digital bugs\". They think their special program can be used as a test bed for theories in evolutionary biology.

In a study that could point to a new way of predicting what extraterrestrial life might be like, a team of California Institute of Technology, UCLA and Michigan State researchers have shown that \"digital organisms\" respond to mutations in ways closely resembling the mutations of actual organisms like bacteria, fungi and fruit flies.

Researchers are using computers to generate ``digital organisms\'` that
undergo evolutionary processes such as mutation and reproduction. As a
result, they have overturned a long-standing assumption of evolutionary
theory.

A book review of Creation: Life and How to Make It by Stephen Grand, the creator of the popular artificial life game, \"Creatures\".