[Physicist]

Although, some people will argue that natural selection is simply working on a hierarchical level above that of the genes

Precisely. Count me among them. My point, which I failed to make clear, is that natural selection is far more capable than it is usually given credit for, even to the point of making such apparently teleological changes. However, I don't know whether Wolfram is addressing the inadeaquacy of naive gene-at-a-time variation, or has some other hobgoblin in mind.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Along those lines, I wrote a short simulation to test the effects of mutation and selection. (Not part of a project, just a personal thing at home.) I set up an array of individuals (about 50000) each with an array of several (about 5) integers to represent "genes." The "genes" underwent (sometimes biased) Brownian motion by adding or subtracting numbers based on a PRNG. The "phenotype" of an individual was computed (partly randomly) from the gene set. A "fitness" function was applied to the genotypes to give a reproduction rate. Then a new generation is created with Russian Roulette to delete the "less fit."

One result was that choosing a bias to smaller integers for genes in the mutation phase and choosing a fitness as having larger integers in the genes resulted in a population of large genes.

The selection phase seemed to work proportional to time and the muataion phase proportional to the square root of the time. This seems to be the correct orders of magnitude.

[js1138]

I don't know whether Wolfram is addressing the inadeaquacy of naive gene-at-a-time variation, or has some other hobgoblin in mind.

I have Wolfram's book and have read every indexed reference to evolution. I see no skepticism towards evolution, although he may have doubts about specific assertions of mechanism.

I may just be ignorant or simple-minded, but what he calls automata look to me an awful lot like the rules of chemistry.

[Nebullis]

However, I don't know whether Wolfram is addressing the inadeaquacy of naive gene-at-a-time variation, or has some other hobgoblin in mind.

Wolfram's beef is with the ability of natural selection to have any meaningful effect on variation beyond very simple gene-at-a-time systems.