Mathematical model for biological evolution and machine learning

Stephen Wolfram gets into modeling biological evolution:

Why does biological evolution work? And, for that matter, why does machine learning work? Both are examples of adaptive processes that surprise us with what they manage to achieve. So what’s the essence of what’s going on? I’m going to concentrate here on biological evolution, though much of what I’ll discuss is also relevant to machine learning—but I’ll plan to explore that in more detail elsewhere.

I mostly put this here as a bookmark for myself, but I have a feeling you’ll read through this before me.