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As far as I understand, you do not need to completely start from scratch to get out of local optima: one individual is enough (at least in asexual reproduction)

As far as I understand, you do not need to completely start from scratch to get out of local optima: one individual is enough (at least in asexual reproduction) to drive a population shift. That is how bacteria develop immunities. I think that for sexual reproduction, leaps cannot be as big, but they can certainly happen and one individual with a mutation is enough. This brings me to mind an article I read recently about a study that found that all danish people with blue eyes share a common ancestor. It's not exactly the same thing, but I would argue that, if having blue eyes was an evolutionary advantage, we would all have blue eyes; and that started with a single mutated individual.

Houshalter 12y ago
The point of a random restart is that you completely eliminate any bias and hopefully end up in an entirely different section of the search space (and it's far from a solution to local minima, it's just better than nothing.) If you just give a random organism a really big mutation, they still retain 99% of their genes and will tend towards the same solution space. They will almost certainly be outcompeted by the non-mutated members of the population. And even in bacteria, they will eventually trade genetics through horizontal gene transfer. Anyway the premise was that evolution is essentially magic and has reached the optimal solution for every task. This is just false. It's merely reached good local maximas where it can't easily improve through small changes. Human engineers are far better, evolution merely had a big head start.