True - but I don't think that's what the author is talking about. You can't simulate biological world-scale evolution right now. As you say, it's just too comp

True - but I don't think that's what the author is talking about. You can't simulate biological world-scale evolution right now. As you say, it's just too complex and operating at too large a scale. We somewhat know how, but the technology to actually do it isn't there yet. Genetic programming, on the other hand, we can do. It's generally used as part of an optimization process, and is simple enough that we can simulate it quite well. To give those processes the amount of run-time that resulted in us (which is what I interpreted the author as talking about) would be trivial, as I showed. To create a virtual world, start it up with some amino acids and a jolt of lightning, and end up with us is way beyond our capability right now - and probably wouldn't end up with "us" anyways, owing to the randomness in there.