It was the Era of Accidents, before the dawn of optimization. You'd only expect to see something with 40 bits of optimization if you looked through a trillion samples.

There's no way that this is true. Inanimate processes optimize too. Lightning strikes minimize the shortest path. Drainage patterns in mountainous regions find short paths between raindrops and their oceans. Cracks propagate so as to find the weakest path. The idea that only living systems optimize is just a mistake.

This bit is nonsense too:

There was no search but blind search. Everything from scratch, not even looking at the neighbors of previously successful points. Not hill-climbing, not mutation and selection, not even discarding patterns already failed. Just a random sample from the same distribution, over and over again.

Perhaps look into the principle of least action and Universal Darwinism.