I have mentioned 40y ago in the preamble of my doctoral thesis, that speeding up evolution is the best thing evolution can come up with. It is obvious that the rate of mutation matters. Too many mutations lead to chaos and death, while too few slow progress. Consequently we can see that the mutation rate is highly controlled and optimised in the diverse organisms. Often it is changed, depending on the environment (e.g, SOS repair, etc) , and/or genetic locus ( hyper-mutation of immunoglobin, etc.). But the main advance is given through recombination (which had been the subject of my thesis). The evolution of sex, brought homologous recombination so that evolution could spread its achievements throughout a population not only the direct offspring. But horizontal inheritance supercharges that. It brought to evolution what parallel procession brought to computation. Only evolution uses infinite many more processors (organism). During my career my various collaborators and I were able to shown that beneficial somatic mutations can re-enter the germline and spread. And that genomes as diverse as RNA and DNA viruses, or those of plants and animals can combine and form hybrid genes and enzymes that combine the evolutionary achievements independently formed in different kingdoms of live. And we have barely scratched the surface of the many tricks evolution has come up with to become more efficient. Consciousness may be just one of the many (partner choice, breeding, etc.) (I haven’t bordered digging out the proper references for this impromptu post, but I am happy to provide them if there is interest)