  It is not clear how to adjudicate this dispute, and it seems to revolve primarily around a difference of emphasis. One can emphasize the difference between experiment and simulation, following Gilbert and Troitzsch and Peschard, by insisting that experiments teach us first about their epistemic targets and only secondarily allow inferences to the behavior of other systems.  (I.e., experiments on worms teach us, in the first instance, about worms, and only secondarily allow us to make inferences about genetic control more generally.) This would make them conceptually different from computer simulations, which are not thought to teach us, in the first instance, about the behavior of computers, and only in the second instance about storms, or galaxies, or whatever.