[geezerjay]

> And I will definitely concede that the space of problems in which they excel and are tractable is smaller than the space of problems for something like a neural network, in my experience.

The only thing that EAs and neural networks have in common is the buzzword abuse. Neural networks are actually useful as they are at their core an efficient way to approximate multivariate functions, while EAs are computationally expensive heuristics abused by being passed off as optimization algorithms even in domains where deterministic algorithms (and even brute force approaches) actually perform better.