A controversial genetic restoration mechanism has been proposed for the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. This theory proposes that genetic material from non-parental ancestors is used to restore genetic information that was inadvertently corrupted during reproduction. We evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy by adapting it to an evolutionary algorithm solving two distinct benchmark optimization problems. We compare the performance of the proposed strategy with a number of alternate strategies – including the Mendelian alternative. Included in this comparison are a number of biologically implausible templates that help elucidate likely reasons for the relative performance of the different templates. Results show that the proposed non- Mendelian restoration strategy is highly effective across the range of conditions investigated – significantly outperforming the Mendelian alternative in almost every situation.