Tangential, but to people who find this topic interesting I highly recommend the book What is Intelligence [0] by Blaise Agüera y Arcas that views life through the lens of mutating self replicating Turing machines.
In the book he also talks about GoF, but one of the fascinating experiments he did is that a "computronium" of initially random Brainfuck programs (that obviously don't do anything interesting in the beginning) that mutate (by flipping random bits) and merge (by taking two random programs and sticking them together) eventually, after a sudden phase transition, start to self replicate by producing gradually better copies of themselves!
He also argues that symbiogenesis (merging replicators into a whole that does more than its parts) is the main driving force of evolution instead of just random mutations, because the random Brainfuck computronium eventually produces replicators even without the random bit flips.
In the book he also talks about GoF, but one of the fascinating experiments he did is that a "computronium" of initially random Brainfuck programs (that obviously don't do anything interesting in the beginning) that mutate (by flipping random bits) and merge (by taking two random programs and sticking them together) eventually, after a sudden phase transition, start to self replicate by producing gradually better copies of themselves!
He also argues that symbiogenesis (merging replicators into a whole that does more than its parts) is the main driving force of evolution instead of just random mutations, because the random Brainfuck computronium eventually produces replicators even without the random bit flips.
[0] https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org