I don't think it really shows that. By its nature, software programmed evolution is intelligence guided evolution. Even though it's left alone, the rules built into the software already contain the seeds for the possible outcome. PLUS, a big plus, the selection rules. This is intelligent evolutive design. It's not mere evolution through random mutations and natural selection.
Darwin's reason for using the phrase "natural selection" was to draw an important analogy with "artificial selection" as is done by pigeon-breeders.
It is clear that the intelligence of the breeder does not somehow directly reshape the pigeon. Rather, the way the breeder expresses his preferences is to SELECT the traits he is looking for. The only understanding required to see how this works in the case of natural selection is to see that nature analogously 'selects' some things over others, without intelligence on nature's part. In other words, the breeder is a "fitness landscape" for his captive pigeons. The natural fitness landscape may not choose the same things as a pigeon fancier would, but it does 'choose' some things like traits involved in surviving to breeding age, attracting mates, having sufficiently many healthy children, etc. Although it is natural, it is still selection.
This is not "intelligent evolutive design" just because a human being is involved in the experiment. Evolution is evolution and other members of the same species, or even members of other species, are part of the natural environment imposing selection pressure.
This brings up a metaphysical point of whether humans really play a natural part in the evolutionary process anymore. For example, when mankind wipes out another species, in some sense you can say this is "natural", since evolution made us in the first place, and we're just doing what we do. In another sense, you can say we're assholes.
Personally, I do see a line being drawn, starting a few thousands year ago and coming to a head now with bio-engineering and robotics, etc., where human-level intelligence represents the next major stage in how matter is organized over time. First was the stellar life-cycle, then biological evolution, and now we're joining the party. If you view it this way, I don't believe we can say that we're part of the natural environment anymore.
Sorry, didn't mean to get all abstract...it's all physics anyway.
It's not bad as a model of evolution. In real world evolution the rules are defined (physics, chemistry) that contain the seeds for the possible outcome. The selection is merely: who survives to procreate. These sorts of models have to establish some arbitrary criteria that permits culling, but that's no different than someone in CFD modeling thousands or tens of thousands of atoms and molecules as a single entity and then continuing the model with thousands or millions of those entities. It's still a valid, demonstrative model.
"the rules built into the software already contain the seeds for the possible outcome" -- you could say the same for natural evolution, if you consider the laws of physics as 'the rules built into the software'.
Regarding selection, yes, this is artificial selection pretty much by definition, since it's simulated. Though it's an abstracted, simplified version of whatever natural selection is, it's not really very different in the end.
The problem of course it's so laid out to obtain the desired results. Artificial selection. But it's indeed shown that mutations, completely random, can breed evolution. The end results are unforeseeable solutions that work great.
Right, bad choice of words. This doesn't show the specifics of natural selection.
I believe the fact they didn't designed the final solution, but instead the rules and mutations, successfully shows mechanisms analogous to the ones involved in natural selection though, even if this is a human-made simulation.
