Universality Without Matter?

Zusammenfassung

Currently theoretical biology offers two different perspectives on the definition of life, one based on genetic information and the other on dynamic self-organisation. Artificial life (AL) attempts to de-velop a universal biology, understanding life as pure organisation and overcoming this antagonism by alternatively seeking dynamical or informational interpretations of the different levels in the compu-tational models it proposes. Nevertheless, living beings differ from other complex systems in the deep entanglement between form and matter they exhibit. Information is explicit in the sequence of monomers of biomolecules, but the self-organising capacity of living systems is only implicit in the properties ofits components. Research in AL should therefore not rely only on computational simulations but develop realisations of systems that take maximum advantage of the self-organising capaci-ties of matter.