There's no comparison.
I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car, and there are caterpillars out there that are moving faster than it. Not only that, but that caterpillar can refuel itself. And it'll turn itself into new ones next year. In the meantime, my car will sit and rust.
Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer something that works as well as what untold generations has evolved.
(And I'll apologize for the tangent, but this is also the fatal conceit of those who believe that any central authority can manage our economy any better than the market can on its own.)
Why? Technological progress through logical deduction is patently more efficient than evolution through natural selection. Modern technology has already far surpassed the capabilities of natural organisms in a number of areas, all within a geologically minute timespan.
Just because a caterpillar can self-replicate, doesn't make it better than a car in every single respect, otherwise we'd be riding caterpillars to work. In terms of self-replication and regeneration, nature has us beat (for now). But if you want to send packets of information halfway around the globe, there is no biological process that comes anywhere close to our technological capability.
"(And I'll apologize for the tangent, but this is also the fatal conceit of those who believe that any central authority can manage our economy any better than the market can on its own.)"
But it can, or at least, a market with regulatory oversight is more efficient than a completely unregulated market place.
Natural environments and unregulated markets suffer from very similar problems. They don't magically gravitate toward the most efficient solution; very often they'll do incredibly stupid things that would leave an intelligent observer scratching their head.
However, natural selection does produce very robust ecosystems, which is why life has flourished for millions of years, and why caterpillars will outlast your car.
Logically, the best approach is to combine natural selection with intelligent oversight. Left to its own devices, an unregulated market has a tendency to fall into traps which benefits an individual or subgroup for a short time, but disadvantages the market in the long run. The Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons and the Market of Lemons are all common effects that can be circumvented by intelligent regulators, but would cause great damage to any market left to its own devices.
They key words here are: "in a number of areas"
In a number of areas indeed. Can a plane fly without oil drillers, oil refiners, fuel trucks, and jet fuel?
Or in a more generalized form: For some X, thing Y is better at X.
Having said that, I in no way belong to those people who think that nature is magical and humans can never do better.
We can quite easily make incremental improvements some of the time.
Note that I consider it an improvement if it still does everything else equally well and some new things better.
If on the other hand, it can't do some things, then it is only useful in a number of areas.
So a plane is not an improvement on a bird, but a bird immune to some pesticide would be an improvement IF that immunity didn't have a huge cost.
Or we can say it's better only when lots of that pesticide is in its environment and worse otherwise.
There's a lot of hubris packed up into that statement. I really don't think you're considering the whole effort, the economy, the resources, the externalities that are involved in all those things that "surpass" natural organisms. The real place we've surpassed natural organisms is in many ways in global organization. Those things that we consider faster, stronger, better etc. than natural organisms are not self-standing things, but things that require our care and attention and vast amounts of energy, resources and infrastructure in upkeep.
And it's far from clear to me that logical deduction is more efficient than evolution. Evolution can certainly result in silly designs, that's for sure (the retina's layering, vas deferens' route, etc.); but evolution also has an appetite for complexity and resilience far exceeding anything the human mind can grasp today, aided or not.
No, I have, and that's precisely the point. Our technology doesn't exist in a vacuum; it's an integral part of our civilisation. Machines do require an enormous amount of resources to back them, but so what? It's the end result that matters.
Many cells in nature also require relatively vast resources to be of use. For example, a mammal sperm cell requires billions of cells and massive amounts of resources to be of use. Take the sperm cell out of the body, and it will die far quicker than your car will rust.
"And it's far from clear to me that logical deduction is more efficient than evolution. Evolution can certainly result in silly designs, that's for sure (the retina's layering, vas deferens' route, etc.); but evolution also has an appetite for complexity and resilience far exceeding anything the human mind can grasp today, aided or not."
Yes, but it has had a few billion years head start, whilst the scientific method is only a few hundred years old.
From a computer science perspective, evolution and science both involve accumulating information and processing this information to produce useful designs. The pace of change, therefore, is dictated by how fast information can be gathered, and how much processing power can be applied to it.
Bacteria are particularly successful in this area. They are continuously passing around information and testing new designs. There is no intelligence involved in this process, but they make up for it through sheer numbers. Bacteria are, essentially, an unimaginably vast distributed computing network, continuously sifting through information and applying genetic algorithms to it.
We have a far smaller computing network, made up of our own neurons and our manufactured microchips. However, despite being trillions of times smaller, our networks are vastly more efficient. If they weren't, then death rates from bacterial infection would remain constant, yet they've been falling globally, and in developed countries, dying of a bacterial infection is today extremely rare.
At best photosynthesis have an efficiency of about 8% At best solar panels have an efficiency of 40%
You can make the argument that evolution does produce wheels, if only by the circuitous route of producing an organism smart enough to invent wheels.
The goal of engineering isn't to beat evolution; it is evolution at work, probing an as yet unexplored avenue of development.
I think considering the possibility that removing gradual iteration as a constraint, or considering the big picture, could lead to improvements of some natural designs, true or not, is unlikely to be fatal!
I don't see how anyone would just dismiss this point a priori. Both of those things seem, intuitively, to be fundamental constraints in evolution. Human biology plus technology leads to us out-competing every other similarly sized animal in any land niche we choose. The question is whether bacteria biology plus human ingenuity could have any similar advantages over biology alone. If you trust your snap judgment without extremely careful consideration, I just hope you're not in charge of the relevant policy decisions!
Even if true, it's irrelevant because nature's definition of "works" isn't always mine.
It isn't yours either.
For example, you're not using caterpillars or other "nature" for transportation so either you're stupid or you don't believe that caterpillars are superior to your car for certain purposes. (Caterpillars are cheaper, so you didn't choose the car for its price/performance either.)
