Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

This is nuts. If I'm understanding correctly, the M. ibiricus queen mates with a M. structor male, uses his sperm to create sterile, hybrid female worker ants for her colony, then she (astonishingly) can also lay eggs that develop into fertile M. structor males, which means she has removed her genetic material from the egg and effectively cloned the male she previously mated with.

If you take the idea of genes as the target of evolution seriously, then every possible "bargain" between different genes that moves towards a pareto optimal for those genes, will eventually be discovered through the brute force search.

brute force search can still be limited in the states it can reach. If there's some limitation on the types of moves you can make, which presumably there is, then you're limited to states that have paths between them.

And in Pareto, there's a rule like that built in because you're only allowed to make moves that increase utility. You're not allowed to move backwards, which can lead to getting trapped in a local maximum.

The mutations are like little nudges to throw you off the local maximum.

And there's junk DNA where mutations can accumulate over time without being subject to selection before getting enabled at random to see if they give you an advantage.

I think both the amount of junk DNA and the mutation rate are themselves subject to evolution for the best trade-off.