I spent more than 10 years working on this problem. One major challenge is how to represent the genotype-phenotype map so that genetic variation leads to favorable phenotypic changes. For this you start going down a rabbit hole of developmental evolution and the evolution of evolvability and then a seemingly unrelated subject: the evolution of robustness.
For anyone that’s interested here’s an article I published in 2008–it has about 175 citations.
For anyone that’s interested here’s an article I published in 2008–it has about 175 citations.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2538912/
I’d also recommend the work by Peter Eggenberger from the late 90s.