Dunno if this is related to the post, but I was having this discussion recently about how life appeared. Abiogenesis. The guy was religious and so he thought evolution was a circular non-scientific proposition, and abiogenesis a hypothesis that hasn't been proved and is extremely unlikely. Do you happen to have any thoughts on the latter? Maybe they created life in the lab by simulating primordial conditions, but can anyone say, right now, scientifically, that we know how it happened? Again, dunno if this is in any way related to the post, just thought that maybe people who know about abiogenesis use some of these 'games of life' to think about their topic.
I don't know much about this topic. But I don't think there are any experiments validating abiogenesis. I think one of the issues is that because microbial life is everywhere where there are nutrients it is difficult to produce a suitable experiment environment.
I suppose these cellular automata models (like game of life) are not so useful in validating abiogenesis since chemical processes might be more relevant for abiogenesis as opposed to the simple interactions of cellular automata.