Natural Capitalism - "nature optimizes"

Natural Capitalism is my favorite book to date. The clipping below is taken from Chapter 6, "Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier", which entertains the fact that better education and learning from nature can make us more efficient and productive:

"Many architects, engineers, and other designers, however, are not being well taught. J. Baldwin, long the technology editor of Whole Earth Review, was told on his first day in design school that 'design is the art of compromise.' Design, he was instructed, means choosing the least unsatisfactory trade-offs between many desirable but incompatible goals. He believed that this formulation described 'a political technique masquerading as a design process,' and he realized this was wrong... For the past 3.8 billion years or so, nature has been running a successful design laboratory in which everything is continually improved and rigorously tested. The result, life, is what works. Whatever doesn't work gets recalled by the Manufacturer. Every naturalist knows from observation that nature does not compromise; nature optimizes. A pelican, nearing perfection (for now) after some 90 million years of development, is not a compromise between a seagull and a crow. It is the best possible pelican."

Hawken, Paul and Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. New York: Hachette Book Group USA, 1999.