That's a nice way to put it. My personal opinion is that Darwinian processes are certainly optimization algorithms, they are just not necessarily optimizing for the same thing as what we might think. As an example, survival is a long-term game. I'm sure there were more aggressive adaptation strategies that went for the local minima and succeeded in the short term, only to be surpassed by the more "patient" algorithms.

There's a huge difference between "exploit in the now" and "exploit, but still be viable in a billion+ years".