No, but a sufficiently morally depraved research program can certainly do a hard take-off based on direct simulations and "Best guess butchery" alone. Once you have a brain running in code, you can do experimental neurosurgery with a reset button and without the constraints of physicality, biology or viability stopping you. A thousand simulated man-years of virtual people dying horrifying deaths later... This isn't a very desirable future, but it is a possible one.