GreedyAlgorithm comments on The Wonder of Evolution - Less Wrong
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So it seems to me that the smaller you can make a quine in some system with the property that small changes in it mean it produces nearly itself as output, the more likely that system is going to produce replicating evolution-capable things. Or something, I'm making this up as I go along. Is this concept sensical? Is there a computationally feasible way to test anything about it? Has it been discussed over and over?
Maybe we can do far better than evolution, but if we could design a good parallelizable "evolution-friendly" environment and see whether organisms develop that'd still be phenomenal.