Stochastic noise can be actually be advantageous to the evolutionary process. Such noise alters the behaviour of the hardware, as compared to its behaviour in some idealised non-noisy world; hence it alters the fitness of this hardware at the task on which it is being evaluated. These alterations are in general such as to blur the fitness landscape, to decrease the difference in behaviour (and fitness) between two pieces of hardware which are neighbours in genotype space. Rugged regions in the fitness landscape tend to get blurred into more rolling hills, on which the evolutionary process finds progression towards higher fitness much more easy.
This effect is related distantly to that of stochastic resonance. The arguments are similar to those for the `Baldwin effect' [10]. Practical examples of this phenomenon can be seen in [11, 12]. The rôle of noise in smoothing the transition from simulations to reality is under investigation [12].