What is the difference between the study of Evolutionary algorithm vs. Optimization?
Indeed, in evolutionary algorithms, you are optimizing an objective function. Hence, evolutionary algorithms are algorithms for optimization. Hence, they are the specific case of optimization methods. However, there are a vast variety of optimization methods that are not an evolutionary algorithm (such as simplex methods in OR, Lagrange methods and so on). See more about the evolutionary algorithms here:


  In artificial intelligence, an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation1, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm.