Comment by 12_throw_away

Dear god. The linked article is a good takedown of this "idea," but I would like to pile on: biological systems are in fact extremely good at covalent chemistry, usually via extraordinarily powerful nanomachines called "enzymes". No, they are (usually) not building totally rigid condensed matter structures, but .. why would they? Why would that be better?

I'm reminded of a silly social science article I read, quite a long time ago. It suggested that physicists only like to study condensed matter crystals because physics is a male-dominated field, and crystals are hard rocks, and, um ... men like to think about their rock-hard penises, I guess. Now, this hypothesis obviously does not survive cursory inspection - if we're gendering natural phenomena studied by physicists, are waves male? Are fluid dynamics male?

However, Mr. Yudowsky's weird hangups here around rigidity and hardness have me adjusting my priors.