Not "a" random number generator, but rather trillions of random number generators running in parallel.

The sad thing is that this understates the parallelism of the evolutionary process by ... many orders of magnitude. A single human gut has on the order of 100 trillion bacteria. Also, the gp poster seems to be unaware of plasmids and conjugation process, too. (unless it was sarcasm that went over my head, which it very well may have been)

I would gladly take 1000 vacuum tubes over 100 trillion random number generators.

And a natural machine learning algorithm.

Same thing

Unfortunately many from the 30 year old flocks are finding the best ways to optimize ad revenue because that pays many times more than biochemistry.

Those who resist the temptation and stay focused on disease eradication will be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams

Tell that to Edward Jenner or Jonas Salk. Unless you're referring to spiritual wealth, nobody has ever got rich by eradicating a disease.

But they have huge, I mean really, really huge numbers. And their generation time is measured in hours.

For the "they" side you elided natural selection, lateral gene transfer, and generation times measured in hours.

So why aren't we then?

The market is failing on this.