Perhaps not no, please enlighten me, where is my lack of insight?
Edit, thanx for the addition. Perhaps my issues with looking at it as "local maxima in high dimensional spaces" (even though we think of minima usually, as in a marble will find the minimum in a landscape with gravity pointing down, sorry I'm a biologist) is that with every mutation and every change in environment the landscape changes (so basically with time), is it still a useful way to think about it like that, at that point? So it not a "landscape in a high dimensional space", but rather a "high dimensional dynamic surface", like a sea?
... In fact, because te landscape is so dynamic and can sometimes change within 1 to a few generations, having a brain as the primary store for behavior/customs/models/information is super advantageous compared to using DNA, as the brain is a flexible neural network and can adapt much, much quicker. No doubt this is why we are successful (ie, a dung beetle will die trying to push a stuck piece of dung, because the behavior is hard-coded and it cannot model the world and model solutions to encountered problems, and it therefore cannot pas solutions on to future generations, as we can. Perhaps a dung beetle will someday mutate to alter it's behavior when stuck, but you can see how suboptimal the whole process.)
Edit, thanx for the addition. Perhaps my issues with looking at it as "local maxima in high dimensional spaces" (even though we think of minima usually, as in a marble will find the minimum in a landscape with gravity pointing down, sorry I'm a biologist) is that with every mutation and every change in environment the landscape changes (so basically with time), is it still a useful way to think about it like that, at that point? So it not a "landscape in a high dimensional space", but rather a "high dimensional dynamic surface", like a sea?