I do think it's the third, _but_ I do also think it's different than the kitchen-sink organism simulations that really were just watching a lot of shallowly-pro

I do think it's the third, _but_ I do also think it's different than the kitchen-sink organism simulations that really were just watching a lot of shallowly-programmed behaviors interact with each other. I think of it more of a model than a simiulation - a model that tries to explain a specific real-life phenomenon in as focused and parsimonious way as possible. Here, the takeaway is that the emergence of two different types of eye – compound and camera-like eyes – can be modelled by a set of 3 specific tasks, in combination with a minimal set of anatomical knobs and switches. Then it might actually be _informative_ to compare and contrast the clear evidence from the model, and see how these explanations compare to the less conclusive ones we can draw from the methods of evo-bio. (A good analogy would be to look at how gates, latches, and clocks can alone account for the "emergence" of modern superscalar microarchitectures, without having to resort to modelling the analog madness of pushing high frequencies through physical circuits, for example.)