To play devil's advocate, are we at a state where you can confidently say the design is sloppy? I feel it's akin to looking at an incomplete puzzle and judging it prematurely.
the shared opening to the esophagus and trachea in humans (and many other mammals). Hundreds of choking deaths occur in the US every year due to food obstructions in the trachea. Doesn't seem too intelligent to purposefully design such a hazard. Also the “incomplete” argument falls apart easily if the premise was a superior intelligence created it from the get go - if it was so, why would the “supreme intelligence” leave things incomplete as you say? Why not make them right from the beginning?
I don't intend to come off as obtuse here, but this was my original point. Our current understanding suggests this is a design flaw and is "wrong." However, there are plenty of cases where new discoveries have changed our understanding of a system.
So, I'm simply putting forward the question: At what point can we confidently say something is poorly designed? I'm not disagreeing that, based on our current understanding, some systems in the human body seem suboptimal.
When you look at the robustness of complex systems we design (i.e., IT systems) vs the robustness of the human body, I think it is at least fair to say it could be designed better.
This seems to propose that IT systems deal with the sheer amount of variability a living organism has to contend with on a daily basis. I don't think it's a fair comparison.
At Google (as an SRE), a large portion of my work was trying to understand problems that people have never even comprehended due to the sheer scale we operated at. Reading through code, I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident. I feel the same can be said for biology. Just because it doesn't immediately fit into our theoretical understanding doesn't mean it was designed poorly.
> I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident.
But the equivalent in biology is that we scratch our heads at some clearly suboptimal "design" choices, only to later find out that it evolved gradually from a much simpler system that solved a much simpler problem, sometimes even a different problem.
> This seems to propose that IT systems deal with the sheer amount of variability a living organism has to contend with on a daily basis. I don't think it's a fair comparison.
Might they not? I think measuring such things would be near impossible, but a human body does interact with a generally specific set of variables on a day-to-day basis, and breaks down when new variables are introduced - like when you travel to a new place and pick up a local bug that you have to get used to.
At least IT systems can generally disregard variables they don't recognize.
This is a bit funny to me, considering I'm quite visually impaired, with no medical treatment available :)
Many people lose their sight or hearing - or worse - regularly, often with no medical recourse. On the other hand, IT systems can be repaired and replaced as we encounter or anticipate certain failures