I'm afraid your intuition about complexity misleads you here. If you'd like to learn more, spend some time with say evolutionary algorithms. It's not a big time commitment; playing around for a couple days will likely be enough. You'll find how the crap an evolution-style search comes up with is really similar to how nature works: a few beautiful core finds + a big pile of hacks of varying craziness, some of them totally bonkers, and quite a bit of insane reuse of things one would never consider reusing.