Career
In the 1950s he illustrated basic self-replication in artificial life 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. In 1955 he published "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life," in American Scientist.
