This book promised so much, and yet delivered so little. To be sure, the author has some very interesting ideas that are worth being exposed to but that does not save this book. The first problem is in delivery - almost the entire book seems to be taken verbatim from class lectures. Certain content is duplicated often enough, that the book could have been cut in half with no loss. The second issue lies in the content itself. The author claims to have developed a working toy model of Darwinian evolution. But there's one fundamental problem here - his model relies on algorithmic mutation to introduce diversity, whereas real organisms generally undergo bitwise mutation. Hence, his model allows for a much more sophisticated search of the genotype space than is allowed in nature. In the same vein, by his own admission, the model can not actually be simulated, because it relies on a fitness function that can not be guaranteed to produce a result.

Not as important, but still misleading, is that his result claims to model Darwinian evolution. This is not true, as Darwinism posits that all existing life forms came into being from nothing (or from a primordial soup, if you wish) solely through natural selection acting on genetic crossover & mutation. What his model actually demonstrates (or would, if it could be simulated) is non-Darwinian adaptation & evolution. His evolution is only capable of tiny incremental changes that can not possibly create entirely new structures - they can only rearrange existing structures.

In summary, the fundamental ideas relating biology-mathematics-creativity are very interesting, as is the goal of developing a mathematical model for evolution. However, all this is worth a 30-60 minute lecture; not this book.