This fascinating book shows that complexity scientists have been experimenting with complex chemicals displaying some of the characteristics of life, and have created electronic computer-virus-like life-forms that are born, die, reproduce, mutate and evolve. Through these artificial worlds they have actually been able to monitor evolution as it happens, since it takes place at a much more rapid pace within a computer. Among the phenomena that these scientists hope to observe are the evolution of multicellular life-forms, and possibly even the evolution of electronic intelligence. Could it be that life itself is an emergent property that arises spontaneously when a chemical system attains a certain degree of complexity?

Richard Morris makes this major field of inquiry accessible to a popular readership as never before, while he reveals its potential to solve the greatest of all questions to puzzle humankind: what is life?