A very smart friend once described evolution, by analogy to software development, as "0% design, 100% QA" (quality assurance: bug detection and elimination).

That's exactly correct.

The process is ridiculously slow, but produces amazing designs. Ridiculously efficient (though not with respect to narrow human concerns necessarily), resilient and elegant. And designs that fail those standards with respect to the current environment are brutally eliminated via extinction.

Though it is technically mindless, you could also call it the ideal process of mindful design, purely driven by the present, free of preconceived notions or attachments to past work. Evolution throws away great designs like the T-Rex without a thought (pardon the weak joke).

Due to its slow, one step at a time nature, it is also a low entropy process compared to human design.

So can we outdo this process? No. We try to use brains to accelerate evolution. That makes everything we do more brittle, less elegant, less efficient and more entropic.

But we CAN explore design spaces nature does not seem to get to. Except through us. It's a small consolation.