Abstract
Abstract An important goal in both artificial life and
biology is uncovering the most general principles
underlying life, which might catalyze both our
understanding of life and engineering lifelike
machines. While many such general principles have been
hypothesized, conclusively testing them is difficult
because life on Earth provides only a singular example
from which to infer. To circumvent this limitation,
this article formalizes an approach called radical
reimplementation. The idea is to investigate an
abstract biological hypothesis by intentionally
reimplementing its main principles to diverge maximally
from existing natural examples. If the reimplementation
successfully exhibits properties resembling biology, it
may support the underlying hypothesis better than an
alternative example inspired more directly by nature.
The approach thereby provides a principled alternative
to a common tradition of defending and minimizing
deviations from nature in artificial life. This work
reviews examples that can be interpreted through the
lens of radical reimplementation to yield potential
insights into biology despite having purposely
unnatural experimental setups. In this way, radical
reimplementation can help renew the relevance of
computational systems for investigating biological
theory and can act as a practical philosophical tool to
help separate the fundamental features of terrestrial
biology from the epiphenomenal.
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