The way I look at it is the selection/mutation mechanism is where the strength lies, the rest can be applied in all manner of ways. There's no reason why you

The way I look at it is the selection/mutation mechanism is where the strength lies, the rest can be applied in all manner of ways. There's no reason why you can't generate the candidate generations in intelligent ways, in fact evolutionary models would be an excellent platform for error prone heuristics. Any cases where the heuristic fails are just discarded with the rest of the failures. I'm currently putting together a shader based polygon evolver and one of the things that I want to implement is smarter mutations where it weighs the relative importance of each gene and can more aggressively mutate genes that contribute the least.