This proposition is so incredibly absurd that it basically doesn't even deserve comment. But I will comment on it anyway, because it's hilarious. Exhibit A: Cellulase. It's an enzyme. It exists. It enzymatically converts cellulose to its constituent products, which are of course glucose molecules. It converts the most abundant organic molecule on the planet into a foodstuff as potent as granulated sugar.nockermensch wrote:So there's a good chance that the machines we call cells are by now the most optimized forms for the physical and chemical constraints of doing complex work on that scale.
You know what doesn't use that enzyme? Cows. Sheep. Chickens. Pigs. Humans. Hell, there are no known animals that produce that (except for certain kinds of termite, which produce a variant). Any animal at all could improve the efficiency by which they gather calories by several orders of magnitude just by harnessing that enzyme.
Organic cells aren't optimized within their own constraints. We can look at them with the eye of a designer and spot many ways to improve them. We don't know how everything in there works yet, but already we can see several areas of potential improvement. And as we learn more, we will find more areas they can be improved. Not "maybe," definitely.
Just for starters: speciation only branches, it never recombines. As designers, we could take two good adaptations from two different lineages and combine them to form something more optimized than either. Evolution will never do that (except with horizontal gene transfer which is limited almost exclusively to microbes).
-Username17