[kaba0]

Given the amount of alternative “medicines” building on that heuristic, I fail to see where it is useful other than for scam artists.

Sure, there are biological inventions we can copy and refine for possibly even better inventions - but those are useful not because they originated from nature but because evolution found a locally optimal solution to a problem.

[yuretz]

Well, being able to identify potentially locally optimal solutions without having to go through an entire optimization process yourself is a pretty powerful heuristic in my book.