That essay is fun but supremely unfair to biologists. The reason that we engineers can "unambiguously understand a diagram describing the radio", "identify fami

That essay is fun but supremely unfair to biologists. The reason that we engineers can "unambiguously understand a diagram describing the radio", "identify familiar patterns or modules in a diagram of an unfamiliar device," or "[use a] formal language that successfully unites the efforts of many individuals" - is because we created all of those things from first principles. We - people - invented radios and all of the parts in them, of course we know how they (and other man-made devices) work. The engineer doesn't have some special mindset that allows him to fix the radio. He just has a lot of knowledge about how the system works, because it was written down by the people that created it, all the way back to simple combinations of common matter. It's easy to have a formal language and tools when you start with the language and build everything on top of that. When you're trying to look at a complex system that was entirely built by some unknown process, according to unknown rules, and you have to figure out the language from observation, it's obviously going to be a very different ballgame.