Artificial chemistry

http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~walter/AlChemy/alchemy.html

Arrival of the fittest The modern evolutionary synthesis based on Population genetics has an existence problem: it assumes the existence of individuals, genes, alleles, etc. They propose a simple model abstracting from chemistry to explain the Self-organization of self-maintaining and self-replicating structures, necessary for the origin of life Darwinian Evolution.

They point out related work in autopoiesis, concurrent computation, a "chemical abstract machine", autocatalytic reaction networks.

Review paper

Artificial Chemistries

http://blog.opencog.org/2016/10/25/cogistry-accelerating-algorithmic-chemistry-via-cognitive-synergy/