Reminds me of this post: #716751.
As humans we are not as creative as randomly mutating organisms in nature at coming up with new tricks to fight bacteria, break down plastic, etc...
As a side-thought, it pains me to say, but when I see machine learning approaches brute-forcing problems that traditional physicists have been tackling by hand outperforming said physicists, I wonder what the future of said physicists will be.
There is beauty in solving something by making logical connections and building up to a solution... I see less beauty in data mining millions of compounds to see which one shows the best electronic properties. Yet, the latter pays off, so who am I to say~~