[duaneb]

I think the equivalent might be something like a beam search or quantum annealing for highly efficient reproduction (local minimum, not absolute) given a hostile environment; selected individually, it's almost certainly an NP-hard problem. However, I don't think this is a productive way to look at evolution: there is no intention, many different evolutionary processes interleave in complicated ways, and selection takes the entire lifetime of the reproduced life form (which may never end!). So it's much more instructive to think of an ecosystem selecting for minimum entropy, IMHO, which is pretty far removed from the genetic level.