The thing with nature is that it's "design process" if one can call it that is really dumb. It tries random stuff and then basically hill-climbs. Significant

The thing with nature is that it's "design process" if one can call it that is really dumb. It tries random stuff and then basically hill-climbs. Significant redesigns are very improbable as a result. There's no direction to the optimization search. I would certainly hope that we can do better than nature in this regard. Oh, and while we can't synthesize ribosomes yet, we can in fact custom-design DNA and inject it into an existing cell: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium