I don't intend to come off as obtuse here, but this was my original point. Our current understanding suggests this is a design flaw and is "wrong." However, there are plenty of cases where new discoveries have changed our understanding of a system.
So, I'm simply putting forward the question: At what point can we confidently say something is poorly designed? I'm not disagreeing that, based on our current understanding, some systems in the human body seem suboptimal.
The counter argument to that is that we do not understand why this is so (together with suffering etc.) which is the end of any discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Evolution_of_animal_...
At Google (as an SRE), a large portion of my work was trying to understand problems that people have never even comprehended due to the sheer scale we operated at. Reading through code, I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident. I feel the same can be said for biology. Just because it doesn't immediately fit into our theoretical understanding doesn't mean it was designed poorly.
But the equivalent in biology is that we scratch our heads at some clearly suboptimal "design" choices, only to later find out that it evolved gradually from a much simpler system that solved a much simpler problem, sometimes even a different problem.
Might they not? I think measuring such things would be near impossible, but a human body does interact with a generally specific set of variables on a day-to-day basis, and breaks down when new variables are introduced - like when you travel to a new place and pick up a local bug that you have to get used to.
At least IT systems can generally disregard variables they don't recognize.
How many times has your hearing stuttered in and out?
How many hearts have you had changed out in your lifetime? Eyes? Ears?
Are you on your second or third tongue?
To say that IT systems are more robust than the biological systems is wild.
A healthy human lives on average for sixty plus years with almost every major system in the body being totally beyond repair by medicine.
There is almost no IT system in existence that has gone more than a few years without a crash or shutdown.
Many people lose their sight or hearing - or worse - regularly, often with no medical recourse. On the other hand, IT systems can be repaired and replaced as we encounter or anticipate certain failures
