"But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips eve

"But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value." As someone who does work in this field, we're not that far away from a fully atomistic simulation of a single cell (with a couple assumptions about reactive force fields, quantum cut-off, numerical stability, time scales, yada yada...)