Richard Dawkins on reverse engineering evolution’s optimal beauty (Richard Dawkins, 9/17/24, Big Think)
Reverse engineering assumes that the object facing us had a purpose in the mind of a competent designer, a purpose that can be guessed. The reverse engineer sets up a hypothesis as to what a sensible designer might have had in mind, then checks the mechanism to see if it fits the hypothesis. Reverse engineering works well for animal bodies as well as for man-made machines. The fact that the latter were deliberately designed by conscious engineers while the former were designed by unconscious natural selection makes surprisingly little difference…
Sublime. Dawkins has always been a self-parody.