Good point. Evolution has replication at its core so perhaps is better for creating artificial
life rather than specifically searching for brain designs (there'd have to be a lot of intelligent design to select brains anyway since evolution doesn't 'want' to go in any particular direction by default other than successful replication). Even though it can't forsee or jump, evolution's mass search power might outweigh these pitfalls (its the only known algorithm so far to have proven being able to build something as complex as a human brain.. though there's all sorts of bundled 'non-brain' stuff like arms, reproduction, kidneys, etc. included, which engineering could presumably ignore). This video shows 2 'wheels' of sorts in nature (but of course living things are full of mandelbroit 'roughness' and have compromises and such, instead of evolving perfectly engineered wheels):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLS2WXZQxU
Those are obvious rare exceptions though, and evolution never built something as fast as a jet etc. and plenty of other stuff that would need foresight. Not sure if there is some sort of somewhat simple engineering principle behind brains/consciousness that we just havn't figured out yet, but if we knew it, maybe we could engineer it like a jet instead of using evolution. A jet seems extremely simple relative to just about any of nature's locomotion creation though.
For the comment below, interesting fractal 'amplification' idea. I've briefly thought about positive feedback loops possibly building something interesting. But mostly just as some vague analogy since I don't have enough programming knowledge to experiment much.