This was my immediate idea for a comment as well. His "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book also has an extended discussion on the "Library of Mendel" which I forgot i

This was my immediate idea for a comment as well. His "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book also has an extended discussion on the "Library of Mendel" which I forgot if he included in intuition pumps. But from a programming languages perspective I think the discussion of navigating "design space" in a generalized way is a very powerful abstraction.