par Bersini, Hugues 
Référence Journal of International Society of Life Information Science, wiley, page (191-199)
Publication Publié, 2018-03
Référence Journal of International Society of Life Information Science, wiley, page (191-199)
Publication Publié, 2018-03
Partie d'ouvrage collectif
| Résumé : | Minimal life begins at the intersection of a series of processes that need to be isolated, differentiated and duplicated as in computers. Artificial life assembles all the spatiotemporal modeling practices of biological realities via programming approaches that are either of the "agent" type or the "population" type. This chapter describes the three possible impacts of artificial life on theoretical biology: a pedagogical support, a formidable reservoir of philosophical speculations and incentives expressed in software, and the only way to realize comprehensible, reproducible and falsifiable spatiotemporal simulations. Software is the start and the condition of thought experiments and philosophical digressions that enable the clarification in a new light of certain fundamental questions on the biological universe. Only natural selection can generate the emergence of a collective functional behavior. Two additional epistemological ingredients have proven to be indispensable to the understanding of the collective biological phenomena: the environment and natural selection. |
