Would fitness landscapes help for part of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape They're typicall

Would fitness landscapes help for part of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape They're typically used for reasoning about other things, but there's a few useful intuitions you can draw. Notably, you can't optimize to a point that is not on the fitness landscape in the first place... so the following comic can't happen: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ Which doesn't mean there can't be any surprises of course!