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

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.