A lot of this discussion seems to be confusing reverse engineering with cloning. To reverse engineer something, you look at it as a black box and determine all

A lot of this discussion seems to be confusing reverse engineering with cloning. To reverse engineer something, you look at it as a black box and determine all of the capabilities and characteristics that you are interested in, and then you implement them in your own way. You do not need to understand how every last cell of the brain was created in order to build a machine that works like the brain. To reverse engineer the flight of a bird, you don't clone the bird, you build an airplane.