Also please, look at the (huge) work of Manfred Drack and David Pouvreau (thesis of 1000 pages, David Pouvreau is a french mathemacian : https://www.theses.fr/174821581) on LW Bertalanfy and the important role of Ashby.
Geographer works a lot of these questions since 1900's, and there are lot of works/simulation in the domain using Multi Agent Sytem (see journal of artificial societies https://www.jasss.org/JASSS.html).
Mathematican and physician often forget to cite their work :'(
Some evolutionary algorithm use gradient descent, like cma-es algorithm. Population based EA can resolve Multi Objective problem, i'm not sure simple gradient descent can.
Great article, it's not easy to develop a new "easy to understand" framework for GA, but we try recently in scala, using the great cake pattern to help user to define their algorithm : https://github.com/romainreuillon/mgo
http://www.rossashby.info/ contain so much interesting content.
Also please, look at the (huge) work of Manfred Drack and David Pouvreau (thesis of 1000 pages, David Pouvreau is a french mathemacian : https://www.theses.fr/174821581) on LW Bertalanfy and the important role of Ashby.