Take a look at http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm

The site gives examples of Turing machines (a Universal one is included) implemented in Conway's Game of Life.

A collection of cells with a certain structure are a universal computer. This is (depending on what you mean exactly) an emergent phenomenon: no individual cell has any “small piece of universal computiness”.

They have a very short, very simple list of properties. The property of being able to compute any computable function belongs only to the system. Most arrangements of cells don’t have that property, but there are many arrangements that do.