This is one of my favorite SW essays. A tour de force in terms of using CA to show evolution, mutation, and natural selection. Don't miss the "Personal Notes"

This is one of my favorite SW essays. A tour de force in terms of using CA to show evolution, mutation, and natural selection. Don't miss the "Personal Notes" section at the bottom. Neat history and insight into the process and life of a scientist. > In a biological analogy we might have a genome that seems to lead to unbounded perhaps-tumor-like growth—but where actually the growth in the end “unexpectedly” stops. I liked this aside. Early "cancer" detection can often lead to harm, mistaking benign for malicious growths. > somehow follow from natural selection a general law...that would lead to the evolution of progressively more complex organisms, culminating in the “higher animals”. But absent the kind of model I’m discussing here, nothing in the later development of traditional evolutionary theory really successfully supported this—or was able to give much analysis of it. A thing that comes to mind is Assembly Theory by Leroy Cronin and Sara Walker.