Interesting you say computer simulation: they have been simulating life form generating programs for many years now, trying all kinds of software and ideas, neural networks, artificial intelligence ideas, etc. And yet, no real result has ever been achieved: nothing that starts to become intelligent, or that evolves interesting properties past a few superficial behaviors.
This goes to show how far we are from understanding and manipulating complex items such as life, evolution, etc. My take on it is that it is past our capability no matter what. Or that there is nothing to understand as that there are no ultimate causes or patterns or laws of nature, past a few basic patterns that are mostly probabilistic (quantum mechanics, etc.). I may be wrong, but just the fact that the 3 body problem cannot be solved exactly, let alone the simple protein folding problem (with the folding@home program executing trillions of calculations a second) gives me the feeling that we should just call it a day, and say reality is past us and over us, and maybe isn’t anywhere or anything at all, it is non comprehensible because there are no causes and laws aside from what we like to imagine.
Granted, science will keep on researching, but maybe the Instant Singularity is the only breakthrough left, wild chemicals in brains and modified neural circuits…
check out:
and try it out on yourself…