It is easy to believe that the computer's only role in ALife research
is as tools for biologists.  The paper suggests, however, that biology
along with many other sciences is being transformed by this new tool,
and hence that even this use of computers should not be trivialized.
Also, beyond simply providing important simulation tools, computers,
computation and information can be releated to features of living
systems in in a much more fundamnetal and direct way.  Biological
systems themselves (i.e., not just our models of them) are inherently
information processing systems, and computer science and its insight
into information and computational processes therefore become relevant
to ALife for the most basic of reasons.