To an Engineer Anything Can Be Building Materials

Yes but technically, mother nature's dyslexic production would never have lasted 2 and a half years without a challenge - unlike my hapless comment.

I agree that some of the most interesting engineering work being done now is biomimetic - and given our much greater capacity to perceive with technical means (including high resolution imaging) the designs in living things, the opportunity for a big leap from the simplicity of inorganic (I mean non living) design.

We could bicker about life being "the simplest" form of engineering. I would see it as beginning with something that 'worked' and then repeating, diversifying, and building increasingly complex self-replicating functional entities all made out of the basic 'thing that worked' (a cell with a functional level of awareness and the ability to replicate itself).

On the other hand, nothing wrong with the random trial, tweak, rinse, repeat approach, at least I tell myself that to explain the non-linear progress of my tomato breeding program.

"On the other hand, nothing wrong with the random trial, tweak, rinse, repeat approach, at least I tell myself that to explain the non-linear progress of my tomato breeding program."

I never said it was the best method, the only advantage it has to 'human-centric' Engineering is that is is very low in energy expenditure over time. The downside of going that far into the 'cheap' and of the 'good-fast-cheap' triangle is that the time frames are stretched out to ridiculous lengths. Billions of years to slap together enough rock, iron and dirt to make a habitable planet? Millions of years after that to produce a life form that can effectively apply all six of the Simple Machines to alter the environment. A time table like that would be totally unacceptable, outside of government contracts and road repair.

Road repair... indeed! A timeline as I understand it of 10-15 years of poorly patched and re-patched potholes, followed by six months minimum of completely destroyed pavement, followed by a one day job in which brand new paving is miraculously installed.

Many arguments about certain aspects of evolutionary theory have in fact pointed out that such a process is completely untenable for the emergence of new life forms, since the intermediate forms are impassible, I mean unviable.

In tomato breeding, there is a straight line process taking seven generations between the original cross and the final product, a stable self-replicating variety whose seeds are 'true'. However in order to make advantage of the shortest timeline, it is necessary to grow out very large numbers of the intermediate generations in order to select the very best combination of traits from the original parents. This requires a vast amount of tomato-habitable space, which is arguably more expensive than time (or more time consuming, if you wait for 'nature' to pound rocks into habitable dirt). Where the final combination of superior traits is the unequivocal goal, it may be possible to do so with far less space and only a moderate increase in time, by creating 'sister' lines which share some of the genome of the primary cross, and may be crossed back into the primary line to recover specific traits that were desired. Stirring the gene pot is then an efficiency of sorts, where habitable space is limiting.

For analogy in nature, take homo sapiens and neanderthal. Stir, shake, rinse, and voila. A mere hundred thousand years from nomadic hunter to six simple machines.