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Comment by Almured | Hacker News Reader

What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction

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But at the same time the motor is extremely finicky/fragile in the source of energy (negentropy) it will accept, while natural life is extremely hardy and adaptable.

I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.

That is a fair point to be honest! I guess when you a 20min lifetime you can probably compromise on reliability in favour of extra efficiency

Every race, the engine of a top-fuel dragster only completes about 900 revolutions and then has to be rebuilt! https://www.motortrend.com/features/top-fuel-dragsters

The need to reproduce and repair our bodies is a big trade-off.

Electric motors are sort of like hermit crab shells - Hard and long-lasting, but they only exist because they piggyback off of a living species.

I mean, we are getting to the point where we can build self completing loops of machinery.

For more complicated organisms, robustness comes in the form of cellular turnover, and regenerative healing in response to injury, at least in youth. I wonder though if single celled organisms have or even need such a function.

Individual cells absolutely do have mechanisms to repair damage: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664224/

They can even repair their own DNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair

Who are we to say the mechanisms of biology are “overfit”? Maybe it would be nice if our personal machinery was more robust, but that robustness comes at an evolutionary cost. The greater force that is life on earth as a system for regulating planetary energy dissipation does not care about the needs of the individual. It does not care about the fashions of the millennia. Its sights are set much farther and its history much deeper than that

Or perhaps we are "overfitting" for robustness over time and also as a group (over society) vs just individual robustness at any given moment.

We also have extremely robust livers that allow us to eat a super wide variety of food as energy inputs

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