So that was a bad quote, I only wanted to address the part that mentioned monotonic-only improvement, since to me, evolution has achieved more than I'd imagine, evolving organs like the eye incrementally.
Basically, the root disagreement was "monotonic improvement". Evolution is awesome, but it couldn't work with only monotonic improvement.
I used to do an "optimization" on my genetic algorithms. I'd ensure the highest scoring genome of the last population was a member of the new one. It made sure every single generation improved or stood still.
It was a good idea to keep a copy of the "best" genome around for final output, but by keeping it in the search space, I was damaging the ability of the algorithm to do it's job by dragging the search space constantly back to the most recent local optima.
I got inspired by this article: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/05/why-does-biologi...