Food for thought, distributed protocols can be evolved using the same genetic programming methods as is behind dividend pathway idea. In the sense that mutations in a protocol result in synthetic diversity and the fittest protocol survives.

Example from this quote:

"Genetic Programming
An interesting alternative to distributed protocol synthesis relies on genetic programming [28, 29]: given an initial protocol template specified in a protocol description language and correctness requirements, if the model checker finds that the protocol does not satisfy the requirements, the tool tries multiple mutations of the abstract syntax tree of the protocol description, ranks the resulting versions by estimating how close they are to satisfying the requirements using state-space analysis, and iterates by probabilistically selecting a variant with weights proportional to ranks. The success of such a technique crucially depends on finding the suitable ranking function. This technique has been used to generate multiple variants of shared memory mutual exclusion algorithms and the leader election protocol [28, 29]. We believe that this approach is complementary to the one we have described and combining the two is a promising direction for future research."

Look up distributed protocol synthesis. Genetic programming you probably are aware of already.
Reference
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~alur/Sigact17.pdf