Here are the answers to the brain teasers:
1. Levy flights are modified in Cuckoo Search algorithm.
2. John Holland was the first person to work on evolutionary computation in the 1970s.
3. Evolutionary algorithms are preferred because they can search very large spaces of possible solutions and do not require derivatives or other auxiliary knowledge to find the optima.
4. Some shortcomings of PSO overcome by Cuckoo Search include getting stuck in local optima and its inability to utilize the Lévy flights for better exploration of the search space.