Adam_Ierymenko: Evolution has evolved many strategies for evolution-- this is called the evolution of evolvability in the literature. These represent strategies for more efficiently finding local maxima in the fitness landscape under which these evolutionary processes operate. Examples include transposons, sexual reproduction,

Yes, Eliezer_Yudkowsky has discussed this before and calls that optimizaiton at the meta-level. Here is a representative post where he makes those distinctions.

Looking over the history of optimization on Earth up until now, the first step is to conceptually separate the meta level from the object level - separate the structure of optimization from that which is optimized.

If you consider biology in the absence of hominids, then on the object level we have things like dinosaurs and butterflies and cats. On the meta level we have things like natural selection of asexual populations, and sexual recombination.