Who are you to say that I am making a mistake that a lot of people without experience programming computers make? Adjust your priors: I am successful software programmer, working in computer graphics, for quite a long time. That's how i earn my living. In my life i wrote all sorts of software (of course not literally all, but still rather significant coverage). I'd say I am not making a mistake that a lot of people with little experience programming would make.

The whole point is that evolution is not generating most of the algorithms. Evolution generated a few, including a very powerful learning algorithm, which took very long time (note that power doesn't equate to complexity; evolution itself is not very complex but is rather powerful). The very powerful learning algorithm allows to adapt to environment on-spot, as well as to the brain modifications. There are algorithms adding computer power to which allows to do 'new tricks'. The new human behaviours, too, are not all that new - different in the extent, rather than in essence. We - not even all of us, some of us - search massively larger solution spaces than chimps do, but there isn't a great deal of evidence that we do anything principally different (and especially not all humans).

edit: One other thing. We do have example of how novel modules evolve. Entire new areas of brain, like neocortex, appear - over a very large number of generations. What has happened in the small brained hominid to human evolution, though, is nothing like this. The number of generations is massively smaller, and the brain is pretty much up-scaled version of the original brain. Note that this happened against strong pressure for small brain size (childbirth difficulties)