That's an interesting concept, but it seems like they are not alone in this field. Just recently I stumbled upon a web page by Moshe Sipper, who seems to work on a very similar topic "Darwinian Software Engineering":

    http://www.moshesipper.com/finch/

He makes a rather grandiose claim -- “We believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to program computers by means of evolution. Not merely possible but indeed prevalent.”