[saulrh]

Evolution is an awful optimization process. It's only effective in real life because it's had literally billions of years to work. Intelligently-guided directed optimization is vastly superior and we should prefer it whenever possible, if only for reasons of practicality and efficiency. For example, look at the development of flight: biological evolution took probably a few billion years to evolve things like pteranodons and archaeopteryx; we landed on the moon in about seventy years.

Evolution is amazing, sure. It's also evil, bad, and wrong, even without getting into ethical issues. Don't do it.

(speaking of ethical issues: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/)

[ionwake]

Funnily enough I was just thinking today about how a living organism is in some ways essentially a brute force attempt at finding the solution to persistence.

EDIT > great story thx

[AstralStorm]

The one thing evolution has going for it is that the process avoids local traps in the long run, while directed approaches... Not necessarily.