And in Pareto, there's a rule like that built in because you're only allowed to make moves that increase utility. You're not allowed to move backwards, which can lead to getting trapped in a local maximum.

Evolution as we know it works on Earth because it is a relatively protected and stable environment, giving genes the time they need to explore a space and adapt to the relatively slow and small changes on Earth.

Climate change?

Climate change produces a changed environment. It actually drives more evolution to adapt to that changed environment.

Even very sudden changes such as some that caused mass extinctions, it just changed the direction of evolution. The only species that stopped evolving were those that went extinct. No more dinosaurs (bar birds) but lots more mammals.

Genetic variation from one generation to the next is incremental - not a matter of tearing it all up and try some something random, not brute force exploring our way through all combinations.

Evolution seems more like building a tree where mostly all you can do is ascend the tree and add finer detail, leaving the trunk and branches (our evolutionary history) in place. It seems unlikely that, say, vertebrates are in the future going to "undo" the major evolutionary developments of the past and lose their skeleton, body symmetry, number of limbs, lungs, alimentary canal, nervous system, brain, etc. We see things like these developing in the evolutionary tree and mostly staying in place once created. Sure some fins turned to limbs, some gills to ears, but once things like that happened they seem to stay in place.

I wonder what evolution would look like if we could see it sped up from the origin of life to billions of years into the future? A building up of complexity to begin with, but those major branches of the evolutionary tree remaining pretty stable it would seem. Continual ongoing change, but of smaller and smaller scope, perhaps - building on what came before.

It's not brute force search, more like stochastic sampling of random variants. It's a directed search where feedback from the environment prunes and weights the search space, and reproduction is a stochastic process biased by fitness. And fitness is defined by the survival and chances of successful mating, aka reproductive success.

Basically, your sex drive is the main search optimization :p

Edit: This is essentially how genetic algorithms in computer science work. They’re often remarkably effective at finding good solutions without needing brute force.

It is possible that not all combinations are equally likely.

The actual space is a lot smaller than it looks. Many amino acids have multiple codons that encode for them. You can also exclude cases where you have repeating stop codons (which detatch the RNA from the ribosome).

There's lots of processes that favor certain patterns over others, only considering the biochemistry of the cell, not even the fitness of the animal.