Artificial Life is devoted to a new discipline that investigates the scientific, engineering, philosophical, and social issues involved in our rapidly increasing technological ability to synthesize life-like behaviors from scratch in computers, machines, molecules, and other alternative media. Artificial Life is the first unifying forum for the dissemination of scientific research in the field of artificial life. Relevant topics span the hierarchy of biological organization, including studies of the origin of life, self-assembly, growth and development, evolutionary and ecological dynamics, animal and robot behavior, social organization, and cultural evolution.
Biology is the scientific study of life - in principle anyway.
In practice, biology is the scientific study of life on Earth based on carbon-chain chemistry. Thus, theoretical biology has long faced the fundamental obstacle that it is impossible to derive general principles from single examples. In order to derive general theories about life, we neeed an ensemble of instances to generalize over. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms. The process of synthesis has been an extremely important tool in many disciplines.