X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Homer Jacobson


History of artificial life

Homer Jacobson illustrated basic self-replication in the 1950s with a model train set – a seed "organism" consisting of a "head" and "tail" boxcar could use the simple rules of the system to consistently create new "organisms" identical to itself, so long as there was a random pool of new boxcars to draw from.

Homer Jacobson

In 2007, he retracted two passages of this work after realizing that errors in his paper were being misread as evidence for creationism.

In 1955 he published "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life," in American Scientist.



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