Not sure I have any similar ideas, I think the other ways I could think of would be alge spreading viruses with usefull code fragments (But thats cheating), or using the rna sysvars to inherit properties (Although that would only allow very limited evolution)
But you may want to consider reevaluating the best bot function. It has a tendency to pick "broken" bots faily often. Like bots who eat their own offspring... they gain a lot of energy all the time from eatings their own spawn and have plenty of offspring (None alive, but I don't think the evaluation takes that into account).
I made a mod for evolving bots with neural networks (Think it's in the bot challenge section somewhere). But never realy finished it properly, and the last version posted has problems loading old sims I think (And there was no parser for regenerating the NN structure from a bots code).
And overall DB code is faster and just as good at achieving the same results... and if DB3 introduces locking bp's from mutations I think regular evolution with DB code should start to show slightly more complex NN like struktures over enough time.