This along with the following paragraph come across as somewhat misogynistic. I'm sure you didn't mean it to. Saying "person" instead of "women" would have avoided that.
I liked your description of nature's methodology as a development process.
So yes, I did mean to make it sound somewhat mysogynistic.
You know, I hear tech people saying stuff like this all the time but the question I would ask is: designed badly compared to what? I mean, if you're comparing to software code made by humans (is there any other kind?) then I think biological systems work pretty damn well. The type of systems that humans write code for are utterly trivial compared to what biology has to deal with -- and we STILL have all the anti-patterns and problems you mentioned with respect to biology. Until human beings can write code of comparable complexity to life that lasts millions of years (forget about billions) I think you should show the woman some respect. :-)
Compared to what it would look like if a human designed it. I took a course in math biology, and learned how a few of these subsystems work. A particular gene regulatory network I studied (can't recall the details, it was >5 years ago) looked like the following:
B, C = (False, False)
A = get_input()
if A:
B = True
if B:
C = True
if C:
do_something_interesting()
A = get_input()
if A:
do_something_interesting()
The debate over intelligent design is clearly over. If you want to argue for creationism, you need to argue that god is a drooling retard who starts a project, forgets what he is doing, and uses the pieces to finish a completely different task.
Just saying, that kind of redundancy might be an advantage for evolution, smoothing it's path.
If nature is a woman (rather than a collection of stochastic processes), then she is a strong argument against letting women into the same building as a computer.
Most biological organisms are designed incredibly badly. The body is full of spaghetti code, duplicate functionality, dead code that still causes bugs, and systems that evolved from a completely different purpose and didn't get the full rewrite they needed.
The nature methodology makes waterfall look like a perfect process:
1) Make a random change.
2) If conversions go up, commit. Otherwise revert.