It gets tricky because the human body is an evolved system. Human-designed systems need to be human comprehensible, so they're laid out in neat hierarchical la

It gets tricky because the human body is an evolved system. Human-designed systems need to be human comprehensible, so they're laid out in neat hierarchical layers, each abstracting away the complexity of the underlying process. Evolved systems aren't restricted by comprehensibility. http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ >Finally, after just over 4,000 generations, the test system settled upon the best program. When Dr. Thompson played the 1kHz tone, the microchip unfailingly reacted by decreasing its power output to zero volts. When he played the 10kHz tone, the output jumped up to five volts. … And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked. >Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.