Homer Jacobson
Homer Jacobson is a former chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, New York City.
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. In 2007, he retracted two passages of this work after realizing that errors in his paper were being misread as evidence for creationism.Articles
- "," Applied Microbiology, 14: 940–952 with Leslie S. Jacobson.
- "The informational content of mechanisms and circuits," Information and Control, 2:285-296, September 1959.
- "On Models of Reproduction," American Scientist 46:255-284.
- "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life," American Scientist, p. 125
- * Retraction of two passages: , American Scientist
- "," Science 113:292-293.
- "," Science 112:143-144.
