Chemistry is not a blank slate. The trick in building computer simulations of evolution is to model the crucial features of chemistry with available computer resources.
That's one of the things the Santa Fe Institute was established to study. If they had "the" solution we'd have heard about it.
Exactly. And there is such a thing as leaving out some of the relevant features OR misrepresenting them (even if due to lack of computer cycles, or inadvertently, or whatever).
My point was not that genetic algorithms, simulated evolutionary methods, etc., are not effective. It is that when they are used as engineering tools, they are an oversimplification (and as it happens, an amplification) of what happens with biological systems in nature.
Cheers!