this is magical thinking. what's so special about "replicating" that it demands an entire revamping of essence? please don't knee-jerk respond, i know your knee-jerk already.

If you're looking at the issue from a perspective where nature's microworld is a deterministic process then the concept of an error doesn't really exist within the context of the superposition of interlacing waves (or, if you prefer - particles). If you're looking at the same situation from the viewpoint of the mother, whose baby was just born dead because the infant emerged with its brain dangling outside the skull, I assume she might think there had been a problem, that somewhere along the way an error had occurred. Both perspectives could be correct in proper context.

i think i can articulate it better. it really has to do with what we take to be the import and meaning of function more than anything else. i'm trying to be honest with my physicalism, and recognize that though beings with purposes and structures with function have indeed evolved, that these facts are in and of themselves not indicative of anything much and are predictable by the logic of selection. i suppose you could say on one hand i am warning against metapurposes or metafunctions, and trying to scale back and be specific about what we're considering to have function and purpose to the degree necessary, and on the other hand asking that we not wax poetic about the fact that function and purpose have evolved. so, in sum, functions and purposes have evolved, but this is predictable from the logic of selection and shouldn't be interpreted as meaning anything outside the scope of a particular instance.