[elzr]

I think you'll enjoy Andreas Wagner's 2014 Arrival of the Fittest https://amzn.com/B00INIQTA6 The title is of course a play on the (in)famous phrase "survival of the fittest".

The book's about how nature manages to actually explore the vast, vast genetic space and harvest its bounties cumulatively, while under the constrain that every "step" must be a viable organism with offspring.