“ It now seems clear, though, that by unifying thermodynamics with the theory of computation, we ought to be able to understand life as the predictable outcome

“ It now seems clear, though, that by unifying thermodynamics with the theory of computation, we ought to be able to understand life as the predictable outcome of a statistical process, rather than regarding it uneasily as technically permitted, yet mysterious. Our artificial life experiments suggest that, when computation is possible, it will be a “dynamical attractor,” because replicating entities are more dynamically stable than non-replicating ones, and, as von Neumann showed, computation is required for replication”