Eliminating sex would leave evolutionaries with only mutation to power their engine. If the size of the population is substantially larger than the number of genes, chances are that every point mutation is represented in it, and the search becomes a type of hill climbing: try all possible one-step variations, pick the best one, and repeat. (Or pick several of the best variations, in which case it’s called beam search.) Symbolists, in particular, use this all the time to learn sets of rules, although they don’t think of it as a form of evolution. To avoid getting trapped in local maxima, hill
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