[notshift]

I think the way evolution operates is quite a bit more complicated than "one bitflip at a time". The way evolution operates is a meta-process that itself was shaped by an evolutionary process which took place (mostly) long ago.

IMO, the genome is like an abstract system which was "designed" for evolution. It can move in one direction or another on the phenotypic plane actually extremely quickly under strong environmental pressures (on the order of only a few hundred or thousand years). And the winds of environmental pressures are frequently shifting, producing what was likely a very thorough and aggressive search of the state space.

I agree there is probably a lot to be learned from further study of the human body and brain, but we will have to re-invent a lot ourselves too since the machine capabilities we are looking for are really a lot different than the constraints that humans were shaped under.

[turbokatsu20]

We have an environmental adaptation system which records state, replicates data with efficient parsing, integrity checking and hot / cool storage.

Even the behaviour that most people call 'evolution' relies on our genetic information system.

We have never in our history, ever, seen a system work with such and so many deliberate intentions in managing encoded information that wasn't the product of deliberate intention.

The burden of proof is on those who say that the work of all the software engineers on this website could all be done if you just leave a computer on for enough time. By this logic, the computer left alone will design its own hardware and supply chain, its own OS, its own backup system too, etc etc.

We create systems, we know enough about them to know how hard they are to maintain. And how much effort it takes to create a working system. Even a python hello world is built on >thousands of hours of software engineering. Why should something like the cell be considered any differently?