"I really don't think you're considering the whole effort, the economy, the resources, the externalities that are involved in all those things that "surpass" natural organisms."No, I have, and that's precisely the point. Our technology doesn't exist in a vacuum; it's an integral part of our civilisation. Machines do require an enormous amount of resources to back them, but so what? It's the end result that matters.
Many cells in nature also require relatively vast resources to be of use. For example, a mammal sperm cell requires billions of cells and massive amounts of resources to be of use. Take the sperm cell out of the body, and it will die far quicker than your car will rust.
"And it's far from clear to me that logical deduction is more efficient than evolution. Evolution can certainly result in silly designs, that's for sure (the retina's layering, vas deferens' route, etc.); but evolution also has an appetite for complexity and resilience far exceeding anything the human mind can grasp today, aided or not."
Yes, but it has had a few billion years head start, whilst the scientific method is only a few hundred years old.
From a computer science perspective, evolution and science both involve accumulating information and processing this information to produce useful designs. The pace of change, therefore, is dictated by how fast information can be gathered, and how much processing power can be applied to it.
Bacteria are particularly successful in this area. They are continuously passing around information and testing new designs. There is no intelligence involved in this process, but they make up for it through sheer numbers. Bacteria are, essentially, an unimaginably vast distributed computing network, continuously sifting through information and applying genetic algorithms to it.
We have a far smaller computing network, made up of our own neurons and our manufactured microchips. However, despite being trillions of times smaller, our networks are vastly more efficient. If they weren't, then death rates from bacterial infection would remain constant, yet they've been falling globally, and in developed countries, dying of a bacterial infection is today extremely rare.