Ordinary Banana

I remember reading about natural selection in middle school biology class and wondering how anyone could object to it- it was totally obvious that evolution would follow from those axioms

(I was aware of evolution as something that was part of the culture war and that the outgroup was against evolution, but clearly didn’t have a full grasp of what it meant)

But a bit ago I met up @alexisgallagher who pointed out an important problem to me- if natural selection is truly the driver of evolution, why was the Artificial Life movement a failure?

The rules of natural selection are easy to specify in code, and with Moore’s law it is exponentially easier to simulate longer and longer times on which it can act- so why can’t we literally create life on a computer? Why are the results fun you’d rather than life itself?