Do particles evolve?

After some reflection on the messages that I have found most inspiring in Wolfram's NKS book, ten years after its publication, in this paper I speculate on a few, highly attractive new developments that NKS-style experimental research might undergo, and that I have myself begun to explore in recent years. According to these visions, the grand challenge that the emergent, localized structures of elementary automaton 110, or similar 'particles', must face in the next ten years is to evolve into populations of increasingly complex individuals, up to forms of (artificial) life, and to a fully blown biosphere. On a more technical side, the paper illustrates some preliminary steps and re- sults in the application of Genetic Algorithms to variants of Wolfram's Network Mobile Automata; the objective here is to investigate the emergent qualitative and quantitative properties of the causal sets associated to the automata computations, in view of their potential application as discrete models of physical spacetime.