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Evolution never creates the best, only the good enough. Nature is not an engineer - her only method is trial and error.

• vog 12y ago
  It really depends on what you mean by "best". When seen on a biochemical level, evolution creates highly optimized stuff on "hardware" as well as "software" level. (Also, it is quite telling that it is often impossible to distinguish between those.) When interpreting this as hardware/circuit/software design, the "code" produced by evolution is by far not the cleanest or nicest or best understandable. It is more the kind of code that you see in mature projects, decades old, where the simple algorithms have been optimized more and more, making them harder to undestand, but still correct, robust and with better performance. Interestingly, even the best engineers need lots of trial and error to finally come up with these algorithms. Maybe their optimization is more targeted than evolution's, but engineers also have almost no time for their experiments (when seen on the scale of evolution's time.)