A Brief History of Everything talks about how little we know about everything. Everywhere we look we just find more and more mysteries. Evolution is like this as well -- while you could explain it easily especially to someone with just a tiny bit of programmer knowledge using Tierra -- we have immense gaps , perhaps the biggest: how did it start? How did monomers become polymers in a sea when the peptide bond requires the removal of H2O?

Abiogenesis is not evolution. In fact, the whole messy bit at the base of biota, where an organism (or protobiont) was as likely to share material with a neighbour as to undergo any other process, can hardly be thought of as "evolution". For all intents and purposes, that part could all be frikkin' magic, and it wouldn't hurt evolutionary biology at all.