Pardon me for not following the whole discussion - just ignore me if this point has been made already.
Any natural population is going to have a range of fitness from the start. Some will be more fit than others, and that variability should be enough to allow selection to occur. Minimally there will be purifying selection, casting out fatal mutations. Some slightly negative AND positive mutations will accumulate over time, so even an initially perfect population of clones will soon reach a state where selection can act.
The premise of GE seems to disallow natural variability in fitness, treating the population as identical clones.