This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2005, held in Canterbury, UK in September 2005.

The 74 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 150 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on conceptual articles, morphogenesis and development, robotics and autonomous agents, evolutionary computation and theory, cellular automata, models of biological systems and their applications, ant colony and swarm systems, evolution of communication, simulation of social interactions, self-replication, artificial chemistry, and posters.