It would be interesting to see how good the combination of EA an NN would be... This is basically us, humans: evolution + learning. Have there been any attempts to combine the two?
If you look closely, all of these are not quite how biology works. In biology the population is decided by natural or artificial selection while in a GA there may be more factors at play (such as favoring a more diverse pool). The way solutions are represented is also different. In biology you have genes which behave according to the laws of genetics. In a GA, on the other hand, the solution representation and the operations to mutate and mix solutions are carefully planned by an intelligent designer.
It basically looked only at outcomes and backtracked in a Monte Carlo tree and assigned weights without preconceived training sets.
And it outperformed the bespoke programs with existing training data.