"software that knew how to apply a selection of mathematical functions to my data, and then breed the results like a GA" yeah, I'd envisaged using the accuracy

"software that knew how to apply a selection of mathematical functions to my data, and then breed the results like a GA" yeah, I'd envisaged using the accuracy of the neural net as the fitness function for a GA that mutates input parameters. It's another layer of complexity, and I've no clue how you'd start, but it seems like it would work. In other words - use a GA to select features, using how well the NN trained on that set of features performs as the fitness function.