This is why I said it needed crossover and got downvoted into oblivion :) turns out it at least tries to have crossover, so maybe the genome doesn't translate t

This is why I said it needed crossover and got downvoted into oblivion :) turns out it at least tries to have crossover, so maybe the genome doesn't translate to crossover doing anything relevant. I wasn't fooling. Think about it for a second, if your process involves a lot of crossover that means large sections of working genome will be passed on. If the ONLY mechanism for changing anything is mutation, then mostly you're just breaking what works. That's what you're describing, so I'd look at how the genome is constructed to understand why it's not doing more.