[api]

If biological evolution wasn't much better than brute force we would not be here. There is no way you could randomly generate a functional genome for anything non-trivial in any reasonable multiple of the age of the universe even if you had a trillion Earths to work with.

But ... GAs are not biological evolution. I think the real issue is that present day GAs only approximate some aspects of biological evolution, but they're very "chunky" in the same way that primitive neural network models are. They get generation and selection but actual biological evolution involves much deeper processes than that. Evolutionary theory is rich and quite fascinating.