[photon137]

A domain in which GAs are slowly finding resurgence is algorithmic portfolio management - I work in this area a bit (ie portfolio management - but not directly involved with the GA guys - plus their research is proprietary) - but their premise is that evolution has done pretty well surviving against nature and products of evolution itself.

The financial markets are a bit like that - stochastic exogenous factors (headline risk like the Euro crisis, the FOMC meeting decisions etc.) and evolved responses based on the principle of no-arbitrage (ie other traders) determine portfolio performance and trading decisions along with transaction costs.

But GAs as they exist are unsuitable for this, from what I've gathered from conversations with those quants. The modifications required appear to be in the direction of structured intra-generation genome modification (or adaptation) rather than pure randomness and crossover to produce agents with a specific trading behaviour (much in the same way as evolution allows a sensible change in the DNA to produce a particular protein suited for a task).