[timlarshanson]

I don't follow how punctuated equilibrium fits in here, but I do agree with your general intuition. Evolution 'likes' spaces that are navigable. Protein evolution is, in my mind, the paragon of this: even though the space of possible amino acid sequences is tremendously huge, since 2010 relatively few new folds have been discovered, and it seems that there are only ~ 100k of them in nature. See https://ebrary.net/44216/health/limits_fold_space

Proteins get the substrate right, and a handful of folds are sufficient for all the interactions an organism could need -- so evolution can find new solutions quickly. (It only took hundreds of millions of years for LUCA's parents to figure /that/ out.)

It seems that being able to parameterize the problem space such that solutions are plentiful and accessible via random search is nearly equivalent to solving the problem... In this case, using an ANN to stand in for ('parameterize') organismal development is entirely reasonable (and would hence 'solve' the problem), look forward to seeing the results of that. But as with the OP I'm cautious as to the efficiency of backprop vs evolution.