Alife is a huge field, and systems as old as Tierra demonstrate self-replication. The concept by itself is not revolutionary, but I am not aware of any examples

Alife is a huge field, and systems as old as Tierra demonstrate self-replication. The concept by itself is not revolutionary, but I am not aware of any examples specifically in Conway's game of life. The question for me is more whether simpler Turing-complete rule systems can accomplish this on space-scales and time-scales that can give us insights into the nature of emergent behavior in evolved systems.