Cognitive radio (CR) is envisioned as a promising paradigm of exploiting intelligence for enhancing efficiency of underutilized spectrum bands. In CR, the main concern is to reliably sense the presence of primary users (PUs) to attain protection against harmful interference caused by potential spectrum access of secondary users (SUs). In this paper, evolutionary algorithms, namely, particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) are proposed to minimize the total sensing decision error at the common soft data fusion (SDF) centre of a structurally-centralized cognitive radio network (CRN). Using these techniques, evolutionary operations are invoked to optimize the weighting coefficients applied on the sensing measurement components received from multiple cooperative SUs. The proposed methods are compared with each other as well as with other conventional deterministic algorithms such as maximal ratio combining (MRC) and equal gain combining (EGC). Computer simulations confirm the superiority of the PSO-based scheme over the GA-based and other conventional MRC and EGC schemes in terms of detection performance. In addition, the PSO-based scheme also shows promising convergence performance as compared to the GA-based scheme. This makes PSO an adequate solution to meet real-time requirements.