// had no concept of "abstraction", adherence to standards or even a logical, coherent design.

I see your point. But I would like to make a counterargument.

If you consider the time scale with which biological systems have to work, you probably won't call their design illogical or incoherent. Computer programs have been around for not even a century. Billion years is a whole different ballgame. Can anyone even imagine writing a computer program with any guarantee that it would be readable by someone 1000 years from now? We have a tough time figuring out what our our own code does a few months after writing them.

And wrt fault tolerance, resilience, I don't know, the design language of nature definitely seems far more evolved..