> Engineering would be understanding the tradeoffs in advance and choosing them with consideration of the outcomes. You're not giving enough credit to the peop

> Engineering would be understanding the tradeoffs in advance and choosing them with consideration of the outcomes. You're not giving enough credit to the people that designed domestic animal breeds. Modern working dog breeds were absolutely engineered for particular tasks; target characteristics were selected up-front, size and hair and temperament and so on, and dogs and breeds were chosen to start from and bred in predictable ways to increase the likelihood of obtaining the desired characteristics. Animal husbandry is only "random" in the same way that sports is: There's absolutely some variation in outcome in each individual game, but if you put a professional NFL team against even a college team there's not much doubt about the outcome of a best of five. Or it's random in the same way a loaded die is: individual trials may be random, but if you consistently use it for the important rolls you'll clean up. Also, I'd just like to say that software engineers would be ecstatic if they had a reliable way to accurately predict the tradeoffs involved in many architectural choices.