I was impressed with how badly you misunderstood the basic statistical arguments in the Dawkins's Weasel article.
The "no useful solutions" mention was to show that Dawkins's model is likely to get at least something right even without figuring in any selection.
It is far from meaningless to point out that Dawkins's little program is deterministic. The evolution portrayed therein does not merely have a purpose, it has an *end* already built in from the beginning -- in other words, it only models design! Remember Michelangelo's description of how he sculpted Moses? Paraphrased, it went like this: "I chisel away whatever does not look like Moses." In this program, the computer "chisels away" whatever does not look like the weasel words.
I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say that AiG does not give, "the space of possible outcomes," since you quoted the addition of them earlier in your piece. Immediately above that paragraph was a partial listing, quoted here:
prob(x = 1) = 37.43 %
prob(x = 2) = 19.44 %
prob(x = 3) = 6.48 %
…
prob(x = 2
= 8.35 x 10^(-41) (exp notation added)
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The Batten article is not dated, but it looks to me like one of their older ones, so some of the specific criticisms may be outdated, rather than having been wrong when written.
Bzzzzzt. You're the one wrong again! Have you ever heard of extinction? That's when no organism in the evolving population remains sufficiently viable to carry on. As far as I know, it still happens, even in an evolutionary paradigm, right? OK, so Dr. Batten's point is that few (if any) GAs account for that possibility.
Actually, the selection coefficient is *highly* relevant, and it relates to much more than the speed of the algorithm. Even a favorable mutation, if the selection coefficient is reasonable, is unlikely to propagate more than a few generations, due to genetic drift. A selection coefficient of 1 (or anything like that) distorts the model beyond any hope of utility.
And your precious AVIDA is a red herring, since the results were, once again, programmed in from the beginning, though more subtly than in the Dawkins example.
"Of course, there is no purpose in evolution, just random mutations within DNA," according to NOVA. MIT Professor Manolis Kellis: "Evolution doesn't have a purpose." Individual creatures may have purposes, but evolution is a description of an impersonal process, not an anthropomorphized Force.
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